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My favourite thing about this debate is when you get people like Geraint Thomas weighing in on it, as if he has anything to say even remotely relatable to how most people ride bicycles.
I'd like to kidnap him, strap him to a bicycle, start him peddling, then tell him there's a bomb attached that will detonate if he exceeds ten miles an hour. You are already seeing him more as Dougal than as Sandra Bullock aren't you?
Force him to ride a bike @ under ten miles an hour for exactly one hour, then tell him he needs to wear a helmet for his own safety.
Helmet schmelmet.
squirrellking -you did not describe the situation well at all and keep on changing it. I did my best to answer
Do you really think you had nothing to learn from the incident or there was nothing you could have done better?
Its so confused as yo keep on changing what you want me to answer on this incident
Again - the only answer really is "not be in that position"
Are you really telling me that a different road position. better observation, better braking technique etc would have made no difference?
I assume yo did your reflection on the incident afterwards?
There is no luck.
Of course there is luck. I was knocked off 10 years ago. I was passing a side junction and was out away from edge so no where near the car waiting in the junction. I could see he was waiting but as I rode past he pulled out a bit too keenly and drove straight into my rear wheel and I went straight over the bars.
Went straight into a roll with hands out so only image was to middle finger which bent back and pretty much snapped and shattered towards knuckle. 3 operations later the finger still doesn't bend and never will.
Not an accident I could have avoided but again a helmet would have offered nothing but maybe some solid steel gloves would have!
Luck plays zero part in all this.
You can't possibly know how many times a driver may have reacted "in the nick of time" that you simply didn't notice. YOU many have been paying attention all the time.. But what other road users are doing? You haven't a scooby old chap. You may have been the "recipient" of other people's luck many many times
Have I understood The Squirrelking Incident correctly?
Approaching a light-controlled junction and passing a double-parked van on the approach to that junction? And your speed at the time was around 30mph?
If I’ve conflated someone else’s posts I apologise, but if the above is what happened (and I appreciate these things are nuanced so I’m not judging it) I’d be questioning whether that’s a wise approach speed, particularly given that you “ended up in the back of a parked van as I skidded and couldn’t save it. No time to think”.
In my young and stupid days I had at least one vaguely similar incident but all such things are opportunities to analyse what you’d do differently next time in order to avoid it outright (and if nothing else comes out of that, there’s always the option of slowing down next time), rather than to think “well that might happen again, I think my helmet worked this time, therefore I’m just going to rely on my helmet next time too”.
A thing about that:
https://beyondthekerb.org.uk/the-collision-that-never-happened/
Of course luck plays a part in it. The point is to ride or drive in such a way that you minimise the extent to which luck plays a part.
Luck plays zero part in all this.
They call him neo down Edinburgh way. He sees things before they have happened.
I'd like to see you tell my dad there is no luck.
Explain why bad luck wasn't a contributory factor on the day he was riding his motorbike to the shops a speeding van came round a blind corner on the wrong side(blocking both lanes) of the road between a cliff face and a Armco preventing you plunging 150ft and wiped him out.
Experts - that is actual experts with job titles to match who stood up in court gave evidence based on the speed stamped video of the following bike that said categorically there was absolutely nothing that could have been done by the injured party.
Luck is a thing - unless of course you believe Jesus is your co pilot.
The point is to ride or drive in such a way
Oh yes of course. I'm very happy to have found a traffic free route to work, it's longer; but the only things I have to think about are dogs and wee kiddies...
Its a semantic / pedantic point. If someone makes an error be it you or someone else its not luck - its an error.
I agree that occasionally there are crashes where on reflection there is nothing you could have done to avoid it but to me thats not luck - luck is something no one has influence over. If someone has made an error thats not luck. someone is to blame.
mleh, special pleading, this is just a variation of your singular definition of "accident". Your black and white view of the world demands it be so. In reality it's a bunch messier than that, you just won't/can't see it that way.
TJ I agree with you about riding without helmet. As I don't think it should be compulsory, and it would have a massive negative impact if they were made compulsory.
However regarding your defensive cycling. That is great for you, you have many years of experience and knowledge how to do that. But unfortunately many other cyclists don't have the knowledge, skills or confidence to ride like that. So they may unfortunately find themselves in more dangerous positions than you would.
Especially more so now with the increased uptake in cycling. Lots of very inexperienced riders are on the roads. And they seem to ride in ways that puts themselves at risk. In this case maybe compulsory helmet use would be beneficial for their safety. But I wouldn't want to see them put off by having to wear one.
Its a semantic / pedantic point. If someone makes an error be it you or someone else its not luck – its an error.
Semantics. The point is that in the road there’s no real option but to take the stoic approach: accept that you have no control over others’ actions, only your own.
Given that, most people would use luck to describe whether they found themselves in incidents that they feel they have no control over.
The key here is the nuanced difference between what we feel we have no control over, and what we do have some influence over (whether by adapting our behaviour or, if that can’t reasonably be done, by simply reducing our exposure).
For instance, the one thing that I feel I have no control over (give that I choose my roads carefully and ride appropriately to minimise this risk—the only other step I could take is not to cycle, and the. I’m risking mental and physical health problems instead) is being hit from behind. If I ride, there’s an unavoidable lottery where somewhere there’s a bonnet with my name on it. Whether it finds me in my lifetime is something I think is adequately described as luck.
But the nuance is important. You can’t eliminate the need to rely on luck but you can minimise it through various choices.
As I don’t think it should be compulsory
TBH I think you'd struggle to find anyone who thinks that helmets should be made compulsory. We're all dancing around a narrow margin of how or what most people would define as a "benefit" here. There's one side that take the view. "Why wouldn't you? Helmets exist, they might of some benefit" and there's another group that suggest "It's probably less than you think, and there are better ways of keeping us all safe" that, to me at least, is the argument
We can only ever make decisions for ourselves based on our best interpretations of our own risk. Trying to persuade others (especially using data, when this argument isn't really about data) is a fool's errand as the many many threads on this subject will attest.
I think you’d struggle to find anyone who thinks that helmets should be made compulsory.
Sadly, that’s quite untrue. I mean, obviously there’s the comments sections on new websites and there’s Facebook and what have you, all frequented with people whose thought processes are angry versions of the cartoon below, but I’m guessing you’ve never had this discussion with a number of triathletes… Oddly it seems there’s a correlation between people who ride flat-backed and head-down as fast as they can with their hands nowhere near the brake levers, and people who can’t comprehend why anyone should be allowed near a bicycle without a polystyrene hat.
Well it seems they do have some of the worst normalised statistics for cyclists injury and death in the UK.
How often is head injury the cause of death? [I can find data that suggests for the UK there are serious head injuries in ~75% of deaths, that's not quite the same as it being the cause of death]
How often were they wearing a helmet?
How often would a helmet have prevented the death? [its clear that motorcyclists (who virtually all wear far more effective helmets than pedal cyclists) don't survive every crash]
I'm not sure how you were "normalising" was that for the amount of miles/hours/journeys on bikes?
Whilst the content in this article is far from being a peer-reviewed study - it suggests about 50% of the cycling injuries in the Cambridge area are hand/wrist/arm/shoulder/clavical...
Its a semantic / pedantic point. If someone makes an error be it you or someone else its not luck – its an error.
It is luck whether you are involved in that error though. If you arrived 10 seconds later and missed the error that is lucky.
"success or failure apparently brought by chance rather than through one's own actions"
Sadly, that’s quite untrue.
Yes, sorry, I did mean "On this thread" or more likely "On bicycle forums" but I didn't write that.
When a bus falls off a cliff it’s an error. The bloke who woke up ten minutes late that morning and missed the bus to work was lucky.
or more likely “On bicycle forums”
Sadly still won’t be true. Might be less prevalent (depends on the forum: CUK/YACF will lean one way but a triathlon/racing forum will lean the other) but there are people on two wheels, from professional racers to some bloke down the pub, who think their ideas about helmets should be imposed on others.
If there isn’t anyone on this forum with that view then I’ll eat my helmet (I don’t really mind—I don’t use it any more 😉).
@bez yup that's about the size of it, glad someone can read. And yes, lesson firmly learned. Sadly hindsight is something you only gain after you need it.
There are things we can do to make your own luck - riding defensively, maintaining our bikes and making sure they are fit for purpose. Sometimes though, shit happens outside of your control.
What about the bloke at the bottom of the cliff?
The well-researched fact is that people take more risks when they feel protected, and the inevitable result of wearing a helmet is that they feel more protected.
One fact leading to one extrapolation. Do I feel more protected wearing a helmet? Do I bollocks. I'm in serious trouble if I get taken out by a car, this is certain. The helmet might take the edge off any brain injury if I hit my head, but that's all. I'm pretty sure that most people don't go flying around with gay abandon purely because they're wearing a helmet. If more helmet wearers take more risks, then in my view it's more likely to be the other way round - I like riding in a particular style, that I've acknowledged is dangerous, so I'm going to lid up - in the same way that MTBers wear helmets because they know they are taking risks.
There's a lot of big assumptions and bollocks extrapolations on this thread.
On a personal basis I’m as sceptical as you are, or at least was for a long time. Why would I take more risks just because I have a strap-on hat? Seems daft. But the human subconscious is a powerful thing, and risk compensation is a fairly well-researched effect with plenty of evidence to support it. And as with many things, individuals may respond differently, but at a population level it’s significant. It’s not assumption or bollocks extrapolation; quite the reverse: you’re assuming you’re immune to the effect and extrapolating that to everyone else.
And yes, clearly people will choose to wear a helmet when they want to do something they consider sufficiently dangerous—we can all agree on that, I suspect. But that’s a different thing (albeit with its own contribution to injury statistics that underpins the effects seen when NZ introduced helmets: injuries didn’t fall much because the people who were already choosing to wear helmets and were therefore unaffected by compulsion tended to be the ones getting injured).
I see it as a bit opposite. Because I nearly always wear a lid that is my default riding style. I'm fairly aggressive in holding my position on the road but I'm careful in making sure I'm seen and acknowledged before crossing traffic or entering the traffic stream.
If I'm not wearing one then I'm definitely more tentative as I feel more exposed.
I'll admit that is just semantics though...
Other road users? Can't say I'm sold on the impact of my lack of lid on their behaviour. Generally if someone gets too close they aren't paying attention and probably don't even realise you are there, let alone if you are wearing a helmet or not.
However...this is a very VERY small sample set, and also will be highly influenced by the style of local traffic, the times I commute (generally outside of peak), the state of the road surface and the weather (I've come off twice on ice). It also goes back to the individual risk Vs average risk debate.
The Isle of Wight does not see the same demographic of driver as central London. I suspect they are generally older and blinder (it's always cloudy for them for some reason), but slower and less aggressive 😉
Try driving whilst not wearing a seatbelt if you're not up for a bike ride sans helmet. However cautiously/defensively you usually do these things tell me you don't feel a bit more vulnerable? The risk homeostasis thing is a thing and probably why kneepads make me go a bit faster. Now, about kneepads...
risk compensation is a fairly well-researched effect with plenty of evidence to support it.
Specifically with respect to helmets and cycling?
what Tim said. When I used to go to work, I'd either take the Brompton on the train, or drive part of the way and Brompton the rest (avoids traffic)
On the rare occasion I forgot to take my helmet I definitely felt more vulnerable, didn't jump into gaps in the traffic, etc. Daft because as others have said, a plastic hat wouldn't save me if I got run over by the 168 bus or the Royal Mail truck, but psychology.
Molgrips - risk compensation / homeostasis is a well documented phenomenon in the human psyche. You can see several folk on here outlining it. Try riding without a hat and see if you feel more vulnerable - that is risk commpensation
I see it as a bit opposite. Because I nearly always wear a lid that is my default riding style. I’m fairly aggressive in holding my position on the road but I’m careful in making sure I’m seen and acknowledged before crossing traffic or entering the traffic stream.
If I’m not wearing one then I’m definitely more tentative as I feel more exposed.
That is precisely it - that is risk compensation - it works both ways
TJ
I did say it was semantics 😉
We need a control.
I'll ride my commute for several months. Alternate between wearing a brightly coloured helmet and one disguised as a bobble hat.
Just need a GPS, a proximity sensor and data logger and we are good to go, oh and two otherwise identical helmets in different colours.
No need to. If you feel safer with a helmet and more vulnerable without that is risk compensation
There is, literally, nothing to be gained by making helmet wearing compulsory.
There are, literally, all sorts of things to lose by making helmet wearing compulsory.
This is an argument that should be being lost by someone else elsewhere.
I'm really disappointed that it is even being chewed over here.
I’m really disappointed that it is even being chewed over here.
I am not sure it is. It is just the usual discussion around why/why not wear one rather than whether they should be compulsory. From any comments made on compulsion I don't see any that are for compulsion.
The problem is that if they become compulsory it won't be because cyclists have asked them to be will it.
At first I thought it looked stupidly bulbous on my head...but hey my head would look stupidly ugly cracked open like a melon on the street!! a year later and it's still working well- I now also commute on a 40mph fast ebike, and wear this helmet in warmer weather. (I use a Moon snowboard helmet w/ visor mostly in colder weather) Also, my 13 yr old son now flies behind me on his own eskate- far too fast! He fought me tooth and nail, but he'll also be wearing this helmet!
40mph e-Motorbike, surely?
Don't you mean a Moped and illegal e+scooter?
At 40mph it isn't an eBike according to law. I'm hoping you have full license, insurance, registered, MOT...?
And a good helmet!
40mph means its not a moped either - they have to top out at 33 mph
Troll of the month and it's only the 10th day of October.