In article <1190744518.007545.42720@w3g2000hsg.googlegroups.com>, Ron
Ruff <rruffrruff@yahoo.com> wrote:
On Sep 25, 9:07 am, "joseph.santanie...@gmail.com"
<joseph.santanie...@gmail.com> wrote:
If I had hit my
helmeted head, would I have gotten a concussion, and subsequently
gone around telling everyone how lucky I was that I was wearing a
helmet?
A big factor in helmet testimonials I think. Most of us will
naturally tuck out heads in a crash, but if we have a helmet on this
is not possible. Plus we will subconsciously *not* protect our head
so well since it is the only part of our body that has protection.
So the helmet hits the pavement and shatters, and we strain our
necks from the torque... but proclaim that the helmet saved our
lives.
I disagree with your assumptions about tucking heads and
"subconscious" actions. My testimonial:
This was a 1998 wreck when someone turned from the opposite direction
across my path from between a line of stopped cars in the left lane
(4-lane road cross-section) and I am doing between 25-30 mph in the
right lane. No warning. I hit the binders hard, try to get behind the
vehicle as it crosses my path, fail. Hit the rear quarterpanel of the
car, vault over the trunk, to land on the pavement beyond.
A most violent collision: Giordona SLX steel frame (I still miss that
bike, she was sweet); fork was bent straight back, and the front wheel
wedged firmly against the down tube (pretty impressive to see, I must
admit). Only one-quarter inch of the stem quill remained in the
steerer tube...nearly pulled the stem out of the steerer (I was
braking hard, with a good solid grip on the bars . Top tube bent
sideways out of line and "beer-canned." As I went over the trunk, the
bike cartwheeled after me as I pulled it up and over, and landed in
the road beyond me after bouncing off the side of one of the cars
stopped beyond in the left lane.
Boy was I pissed off. I got up, dusted myself off, grabbed my bike,
and threw it to the side of the road in disgust before stalking over
to him to give the teenage young turk (with an already long record of
driving infractions and DUI as it turned out) a stern tongue lashing.
(Really impressive that the front wheel was still wedged after the
toss!) How, you may ask, did I not die then and there on the pavement?
In my very young youth, I learned tumbling. Maybe one of those summer
activities parents sign us up for to spare their sanity; I was so
young I don't remember the details of what it was or how it came to
be. But somewhere along the way of growing up I learned to run very
fast across the room and launch myself over my fellow classmates who
were side-by-side on their hands and knees stretched seemingly to the
horizon.
While imitating a projectile, I learned how to tuck and roll as I
landed.
It had probably been 35 years, 130 pounds, and 2.5 feet in altitude
since I had done such a thing. Then I had a pad at the landing zone;
this time I didn't. But the motor skills were imprinted on me and I am
certain that the instinctual response is what got me through it
safely.
You could follow the path of my roll along the pavement from the
marks, dents, and cracks on the helmet through the tears in my jersey
and the the road rash on my shoulder, arm, hip, and buttock. A human
bowling ball.
The helmet did not prevent me from tucking my head. I certainly had no
conscious *or* subconscious thoughts about not protecting my head
because it was helmeted as I flew through the air with the greatest of
ease. I have no recollection of thinking anything. It didn't happen in
slow motion for me.
The helmet did not shatter because it struck the ground in a rolling,
glancing way as did the rest of me as I distributed the forces of
landing across a greater area of my body through the roll. Certainly
friction of contact with pavement scraped up my clothes and me. But I
didn't have any scalp burn except for a bit of a red forehead (not
bruised, but 1st degree burn from the helmet pad). I ended up with a
badly sprained right wrist, and arthroscopic shoulder surgery after 3
years of trying to work out the inflammation with therapy and a couple
cortisone shots, both from the big yank on my arms as I clutched the
brakes.
I agree that a helmet is NFG in a blunt force collision of the head
with an object. But I found it very useful in preventing road rash on
my head, which is good enough reason for me. Healing all that other
road rash was plenty painful without adding my head to the quota.
Freaking excellent post. The biggest "fiction" as I called it in Ron's hypothesis is that someone actually has time to consider whether he or she is lidded when in a sudden bike crash. It's just ridiculous, as you aptly describe.
I wear a helmet for exactly the kind of unfortunate, unavoidable accident in which you were involved. Not to save my life, but to lessen my injuries, pain and suffering.
That's really the bottom line for me. It makes no difference to me if
helmets are exceedingly effective at preventing injury of some sorts,
if at the same time they increase the overall likelihood of accident,
or the incidence other sorts of injury, enough to cancel out the
entire benefit of wearing one. And I can't see how else to interpret
the data.
That is I think the bottom line for me too. But I am just going by
feel; I don't know anything about the numbers. Can you (at least
qualitatively) explain how you see that the downside cancels the
upside?
It's in the total yearly fatalities statistics for bicyclists. I've
seen the tables time and again from different sources over the years,
though I don't have a handy link for you at the moment. (USDOT's
Fatality Analysis Reporting System is usable for this, but at the
moment they only list totals for the years since 1994.) The number of
bicyclists killed while riding has remained about the same in
proportion to the total number of bicyclists for the time span of
interest-- from the '80s when helmet use approximated 0% to the
present day, when helmet use approximates 50%. If helmets worked as
advertised overall, the trend would be reflected in the fatalities.
But it isn't.
If helmets don't protect us to any significant degree, which is the
simplest explanation for their lack of effect on cycling-related
fatalities, then we shouldn't wear them. But if we take a leap of
faith and assume that helmets must, by their very nature, provide some
significant protection against fatal head injury, then to make sense
of the fatalities numbers we also have to assume that they save the
lives of some number of people and kill approximately the same number
of others. If that's the case, then why bother?
Chalo
The evidence is even better than that - you just have to look at the areas where helmet compulsion was introduced - there are huge sudden increases in helmet-wearing, and no changes in injury rate.
The whole helmet-thing is counter-intuitive to people who can't think above a Paris Hilton level. On r.b.t., those people are merely an annoyance, but because enough of our politicians also act as though that's the limit of their intellectual capacity we get more and more MHLs. I see no reason to encourage them in this practice.
faith and assume that helmets must, by their very nature, provide some
significant protection against fatal head injury, then to make sense
of the fatalities numbers we also have to assume that they save the
lives of some number of people and kill approximately the same number
of others. If that's the case, then why bother?
Because what happens at the population level is different from the level of
the individual.
Taking your premise "helmets must, by their very nature, provide some
significant protection against fatal head injury" the stats do not show if
it is the same populations being killed. If inexperienced cyclists are
encouraged to cycle weaning a helmet and are killed in disproportionate
numbers while helmets at the same time do protect experienced cyclists who
do not take unnecessary risks, the overall population stats could be as we
find them but to you as an individual, experienced cyclist the helmet would
provide protection.
pk
I rather suspect that the population studies show this to be not so. It may depend, of course, on your definition of "experienced" - but in all those studies where helmet compulsion was introduced, helmet wearing rates shot up, and the injury rates did not change.
If "experienced" cyclists had a different injury rate with and without helmets compared to "inexperienced" cyclists with and without, the only way we would see the results we have requires that the difference in rate must be so small that it is insignificant, or that it is
a) different in sign, and b) exactly balanced by the differences in the size of the two sub-populations
In the end, though, it doesn't matter. Cycling is not dangerous enough to need a helmet, even if they did work.
In the end, though, it doesn't matter. Cycling is not dangerous enough to
need a helmet, even if they did work.
Understood that this is rec.bicycles.tech and not alt.mtb...
Having said that, one needs to distinguish between somebody riding down a paved road and an ATB rider bouncing through a garden of baby heads. -- PeteCresswell
On Wed, 26 Sep 2007 08:30:08 -0400, (PeteCresswell) wrote:
Per _:
In the end, though, it doesn't matter. Cycling is not dangerous enough to
need a helmet, even if they did work.
Understood that this is rec.bicycles.tech and not alt.mtb...
Having said that, one needs to distinguish between somebody
riding down a paved road and an ATB rider bouncing through a
garden of baby heads.
Why do you think that matters? The rate of death, for example, of ALL forms of cycling, helmeted or not, is on the order of one per 450 years of cycling non-stop 24 hours a day.
If MTB cycling is 10 times more dangerous than the road cycling, it is still not dangerous enough to require a helmet - even if they did work.
Same reason I was glad to have my helmet (which I don't always wear...) on when I took a 1" deadhead sticking out of an overhanging branch. Put a nice little hole in the helmet, but not in my forehead or eye socket.
OTOH, I still wonder what the outcome would have been if that deadhead had snagged on a helmet strap instead of poking it.
Some years back I saw movie footage of a guy dying when he fell and hit his head on the edge of a curb. He was going all of 2 mph when it happened. He was already in a standing position when he fell (he was on a skateboard with a small sail on it).
Hot day, bike path? Helmet? No way Jose'.
Single track with rocks on the side? You betcha. -- PeteCresswell
Tim McNamara 26 September 2007 17:28:21 [ permanent link ]
In article <1l53hjb6ubs5a$.1tdwmj8kyr16k$.dlg@40tude.net>, _ <jtayNOSPAMlor@hfDONTSENDMESPAMx.andara.com> wrote:
On Wed, 26 Sep 2007 08:30:08 -0400, (PeteCresswell) wrote:
Per _:
In the end, though, it doesn't matter. Cycling is not dangerous
enough to need a helmet, even if they did work.
Understood that this is rec.bicycles.tech and not alt.mtb...
Having said that, one needs to distinguish between somebody riding
down a paved road and an ATB rider bouncing through a garden of
baby heads.
Why do you think that matters? The rate of death, for example, of
ALL forms of cycling, helmeted or not, is on the order of one per 450
years of cycling non-stop 24 hours a day.
According to the Minnesota Department of Health's report a few years back, there were twice as many brain injuries in "non motor vehicle traffic" bike crashes versus "motor vehicle traffic" bike crashes. The latter are probably almost totally road biking related; the latter could be a mix (e.g., bike trails as well as off-road riding):
There are some more recent discussions, which I only skimmed and didn't find to have much specific information related to cycling. One thing I noted is that motorcyclists and pedestrians both were struck by cars at three times the numbers of cyclists struck by cars.
If MTB cycling is 10 times more dangerous than the road cycling, it
is still not dangerous enough to require a helmet - even if they did
work.
And here is MNDoH's information on brain injuries and helmets, not only for cyclists but equestrians and other sports (unfortunately these are just tables with no context, so I found the data very difficult to interpret):
On Wed, 26 Sep 2007 08:30:08 -0400, (PeteCresswell) wrote:
Per _:
In the end, though, it doesn't matter. Cycling is not dangerous
enough to need a helmet, even if they did work.
Understood that this is rec.bicycles.tech and not alt.mtb...
Having said that, one needs to distinguish between somebody riding
down a paved road and an ATB rider bouncing through a garden of
baby heads.
Why do you think that matters? The rate of death, for example, of
ALL forms of cycling, helmeted or not, is on the order of one per 450
years of cycling non-stop 24 hours a day.
According to the Minnesota Department of Health's report a few years
back, there were twice as many brain injuries in "non motor vehicle
traffic" bike crashes versus "motor vehicle traffic" bike crashes. The
latter are probably almost totally road biking related; the latter could
be a mix (e.g., bike trails as well as off-road riding):
Numbers of injuries are useless by themselves. You need exposure data as well. What is the social value of the difference between (using the value of two you provide, and assuming for the sake of simplicity that on-road and off-road exposue is equal) one death per 112 years of cycling non-stop 24 hours a day and one per 562 years of cycling non-stop 24 hours a day? They are BOTH extremely small risks - and anyone who can do maths can draw the obvious conclusion.
And after that, you need to know what sort of numbers/exposures exist for other activities.
If that is not available, there is no argument for helmets, and hence for helmet compulsion.
If it is available, the numbers must show that helmets make a significant difference, and that the rate of injury without them is larger than that for other activities by an amount large enough that the reduction is sufficient to offset the costs associated with their use and/or compulsion, where the other activities do not have helmet use and/or compulsion.
The above is sufficiently complex that people who post things like:
"It's really not that complicated"
as a reason for wearing a cycle helmet are only revealing that they have not - or can not - think it through.
On Wed, 26 Sep 2007 08:55:18 -0600, Paul Cassel wrote:
Tim McNamara wrote:
The best documented case is Australia, which enacted a mandatory helmet
law. The head injury rate for cyclists went up not down, and it
appeared that what happened was that many cyclists gave up riding and
that the main protective factor for cyclists is having more of us on the
roads. The more of us there are, the more aware drivers tend to be of
cyclists.
What does bug me about the helmet crowd is that they are the basis of
mandatory helmet laws. The anti's aren't trying to legislate helmets out
of existence but the pro's seem to favor mandatory use laws. They try to
use helmet as a public health issue.
I think the fervor against helmets in both worlds is due to the
perceived threat that the pro's will force their POV upon all of us. I
personally wear a helmet on the motorcycle but rarely on a bicycle.
Still, I enjoy being free to choose which to me, is the crux of the debate.
That is so true.
Politicians generally do not lead, but follow. As more and more people become convinced that cycling is dangerous and helmets must be worn, the politicians find it easier and easier to pass legislation to compel their use (some even have the temerity to state this outright). In the USofA, this is most clearly seen in California, where the first MHL was enacted, and today millions people are required to wear a helmet if they wish to cycle.
We have a poster here whom I believe lives in California, and he is virulently pro-helmet, to the point where he conducts diatribes against helmet skeptics; an example of politicians getting the kind of electorate they deserve, I suppose.
Bill Sornson 26 September 2007 19:37:13 [ permanent link ]
Ron Ruff wrote:
On Sep 26, 6:39 am, _ <jtayNOSPAM...@hfDONTSENDMESPAMx.andara.com>
wrote:
The rate of death, for example, of ALL
forms of cycling, helmeted or not, is on the order of one per 450
years of cycling non-stop 24 hours a day.
Is this true?
No.
How is this determined?
Creative numeric massagery. HTH
Cyclists are a fairly small
population in the US and I don't know that many people... but I knew a
few cyclists who have been killed... and know *of* many more.
So you must be...over 2500 years old! LOL
Unfortunately, I have no way of making meaningful statistics from
that.
Hey, you're on to something.
I've known people who died in car crashes too...
A more interesting statistic would be the rate of serious injury or
death among the racing or club membership population. At least then
would could assume that they know how to ride and we can take a guess
at an avg yearly mileage. I remember seeing some stats from a major
national club that were insanely low... but I wonder how they presumed
to know this information? Dead members are unlikely to call the head
office and report what happened...
Using whole population studies to decide whether to wear a helmet is ludicrous. What matters is personal experience, riding style, risk tolerance and CHOICE. (Hey, I should stroll thru Harlem at 1:00 AM with $100 bills stufffed in my shirt pockets. After all, /whole population studies/ say my risk of getting mugged is miniscule! Same exact thing.)
Bill Sornson 26 September 2007 19:45:36 [ permanent link ]
Ron Ruff wrote:
On Sep 25, 11:09 pm, "Bill Sornson" <as...@ask.me> wrote:
Freaking excellent post. The biggest "fiction" as I called it in
Ron's hypothesis is that someone actually has time to consider
whether he or she is lidded when in a sudden bike crash. It's just
ridiculous, as you aptly describe.
Odd... when I read his post I thought it bolstered my argument.
Read it again. (Strange that you deleted not only his account but also his identity.)
Just
as he subconsciously tucked and rolled, we all will go into some life
preserving mode in sudden crisis like a crash. Not having time to
consider or even remembering the event is irrelevant. If you *feel*
that the helmet is protecting your head, then you will automatically
respond as though it is protected. And as Joseph pointed out, the fact
that the helmet sticks out several inches makes it much more likely to
impact the ground (hard) in a tumbling situation. The net result is
that helmeted head impacts *should* ocurr at a significantly higher
rate than non-helmeted head impacts... given similar crash scenarios.
If the goal is to keep your head from getting skinned up, then the old
hairnet seems like a much better choice than a helmet. Frankly, I wish
that they would design helmets with a much thinner shell... and
without "spoilers" on the back.
If I suddenly get knocked off my bike, instinct takes over 100%. There is no time nor inclination to consider, "Hey, I've got a helmet on so I don't need to protect my head as much as I would if I didn't" or anything close to that -- subconcious or not.
This is why Dan Becker (had to go look since you trimmed him) wrote FIRST: "I disagree with your assumptions about tucking heads and 'subconscious' actions. My testimonial:"
Odd that you'd say, "Odd... when I read his post I thought it bolstered my argument." when in fact he introduced it by saying he disagreed with it.
If the goal is to keep your head from getting skinned up, then the old
hairnet seems like a much better choice than a helmet. Frankly, I wish
that they would design helmets with a much thinner shell... and
without "spoilers" on the back.
That's what I went over to for windsurfing when beyond my normal comfort/experience level. It's called a Gath. Kind of a minimalist, low-profile/low-drag design. Reason I switched was that *twice* I got my neck tweaked when hitting the water at maybe 18-20 mph. Second time I was just laying there unable to feel anything in my hands.
It undoubtedly doesn't offer all the technical brain-acceleration protection of a "real" helmet... but I have to trade that off against getting my neck wrenched. Also, I've eaten my waveski a couple of times and it's worked 100%. -- PeteCresswell
On Wed, 26 Sep 2007 08:14:24 -0000, "joseph.santaniello@gmail.com" <joseph.santaniello@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sep 26, 4:47 am, Chalo <chalo.col...@gmail.com> wrote:
That's really the bottom line for me. It makes no difference to me if
helmets are exceedingly effective at preventing injury of some sorts,
if at the same time they increase the overall likelihood of accident,
or the incidence other sorts of injury, enough to cancel out the
entire benefit of wearing one. And I can't see how else to interpret
the data.
That is I think the bottom line for me too. But I am just going by
feel; I don't know anything about the numbers. Can you (at least
qualitatively) explain how you see that the downside cancels the
upside?
Joseph
Dear Jospeh,
As Chalo explains, bicycle helmets have no significant effect on the rates of serious head injury and death.
If they were a drug, they'd be dismissed as snake oil--claims of bicycle helmets reducing serious head injury and death are never substantiated by any figures for whole populations, such as states, provinces, or nations.
Going from nearly 0% helmet use to nearly 100% in New Zealand, with a huge mandatory increase in the middle of the 8-year graph, had no apparent effect on the gentle and typical downward trend of such injuries:
That is, the green line for bicycle helmet use zooms upward with no corresponding effect on the red bicycle injury rate or the black pedestrian injury rate used as a control to rule out other factors. Things gradually improved at the same rate for both groups, but helmets had no more effect on the injury rate than hair color.
Who would take a pill that failed so obviously to have any effect? Who would pass laws requiring everyone to take such pills?
Some of the downside or disadvantages that cancel the hoped-for but never-visible helmet protection effect are:
A) You hit more things that you normally wouldn't--do some measurements with a ruler and see how much bigger a helmet makes your head.
B) When you hit things, the size of the helmet gives whatever you hit more leverage to spin your head--and more and more studies show that it's the rotational head injuries that are the problem. Your brain can take a surprisingly powerful straightforward impact, but an abrupt spin causes diffuse injuries.
C) Risk compensation is our peculiar habit of automatically raising (and lowering) our level of risk to whatever level we think is "safe", whether we're right or not. Given safety equipment, we behave more recklessly. Take the safety equipment away, and we become cautious. The Munich taxi driver study showed that taxi drivers would speed and tailgate on days when they were given taxis from the motor pool that had anti-lock brakes, effectively negating the hoped-for protection of the brakes.
Helmets provide a marvelous example of how we deny risk compensation, even while admitting it. A typical exchange on RBT involves asking people who deny that wearing a helmet makes them ride differently what they'd do if they lost their helmet half-way through a long ride.
Invariably, they admit that they'd ride more slowly and cautiously, or (amazingly) even call for someone to give them a ride home rather than face the terrible perceived risk of bicycling without something hundreds of millions of bicyclists never use (see any picture of swarms of Chinese commuter bicyclists).
Tim McNamara 26 September 2007 23:25:40 [ permanent link ]
In article <46fa78bb$0$11087$4c368faf@roadrunner.com>, "Bill Sornson" <askme@ask.me> wrote:
Paul Cassel wrote:
What does bug me about the helmet crowd is that they are the basis
of mandatory helmet laws. The anti's aren't trying to legislate
helmets out of existence but the pro's seem to favor mandatory use
laws. They try to use helmet as a public health issue.
Totally incorrect. Around here, just being in favor of helmet use
gets one accused of being pro MHL. (And also, some of the more
virulent AHZs do seem to advocate getting rid of lids altogether.
They argue everything from they're dangerous to their use is
tantamount to favoring MHLs.)
To correct your diatribe, Bill, there are *a couple* of people who do this, one of whom (Avery) has hardly posted in years. The rest of us just want to preserve individual choice. Certainly you, as a conservative, are not against people having the chance to make up their own minds.
Tim McNamara 26 September 2007 23:35:58 [ permanent link ]
In article <1190822745.343518.108060@19g2000hsx.googlegroups.com>, Ron Ruff <rruffrruff@yahoo.com> wrote:
On Sep 26, 6:39 am, _ <jtayNOSPAM...@hfDONTSENDMESPAMx.andara.com>
wrote:
The rate of death, for example, of ALL forms of cycling, helmeted
or not, is on the order of one per 450 years of cycling non-stop 24
hours a day.
Is this true? How is this determined? Cyclists are a fairly small
population in the US and I don't know that many people... but I knew
a few cyclists who have been killed... and know *of* many more.
We've had a rash of them here in the last month- a guy got run over by a school bus, a kid was hit by a car, another guy was beaten to death while riding his bike, etc.
Michael Press 27 September 2007 09:27:41 [ permanent link ]
In article <1190822745.343518.108060@19g2000hsx.googlegroups.com>, Ron Ruff <rruffrruff@yahoo.com> wrote:
Is this true? How is this determined? Cyclists are a fairly small
population in the US and I don't know that many people... but I knew a
few cyclists who have been killed... and know *of* many more.
Unfortunately, I have no way of making meaningful statistics from
that. I've known people who died in car crashes too...
Many people have reported here that they have known people killed on a bicycle, and know of other people killed on a bicycle. How do we know that many of these fatalities have not been reported multiple times? This is not an idle musing. Everybody knows many people, and they all know many people. Also the combinatorics enter in. Look up the "birthday paradox" if you do not know what it is. How many people have mentioned the death of Ken K.? Repetition of the same fatalities can give a misleading impression.
Is this true? How is this determined? Cyclists are a fairly small
population in the US and I don't know that many people... but I knew
a few cyclists who have been killed... and know *of* many more.
Unfortunately, I have no way of making meaningful statistics from
that. I've known people who died in car crashes too...
Many people have reported here that they have known
people killed on a bicycle, and know of other people
killed on a bicycle. How do we know that many of these
fatalities have not been reported multiple times? This
is not an idle musing. Everybody knows many people, and
they all know many people. Also the combinatorics enter
in. Look up the "birthday paradox" if you do not know
what it is. How many people have mentioned the death of
Ken K.? Repetition of the same fatalities can give a
misleading impression.
Why did you snip the claim that prompted Ron's question(s)? Do you agree
with this:
"The rate of death, for example, of ALL forms of cycling, helmeted or not,
is on the order of one per 450 years of
cycling non-stop 24 hours a day."
Wow, if we all know of the SAME incidents, then practically NO ONE EVER GETS
KILLED WHILE CYCLING!!!
HTH (but know it won't)
Bill: there are about 1200 licensed road racers in the province of British Columbia. I know of three who have died in riding incidents in the last 15 or so years.
Now mind you, of those three, I have heard of two of them (both died before I entered the sport) and actually met the third rider personally (though I knew him only slightly, I know his riding companion from that fatal day quite well).
One of the three probably wasn't a licensed racer when he died. So really, we're talking two deaths in 15 years out of a population of 1200 riders, but there were probably one or two racing cyclists who died in action in that time that I didn't hear about.
That makes something like 3-4 deaths per 18000 real-years of serious cycling exposure, amount of time per year of cycling not specified.
But it suggests a rate of about one death for every 6000 or so real-years of serious cycling exposure. It's not too far-fetched to assume that each licensed rider's exposure is in the order of 1/20th of their life, which is like riding for 8.4 hours a week. So to figure out "continuous years of cycling", we divide that 6000 by 20, makes... 300 years.
Which is astonishingly close to that 450 years of cycling non-stop estimate.
And yet, I've heard of three of these unlikely deaths! And yet, it doesn't contradict the stats that it is so.
In my life, I have lost one acquaintance to a cycling incident, a grandmother and two high school classmates to car crashes (class of 100 at graduation; both died before the 10th reunion), maybe dozens to cancer, at least two to misadventure, a whole bunch to what is best classified as old age, and that's all off the top of my head. Oh, and one or two motorcycling friends died along the way, too.
The fact is that deaths -- especially deaths that are memorable, sudden, and coincide with a particular interest of yours -- stick in the mind. My father could probably give you a detailed list of all the men aged 40-60 who died of heart attacks and whose funeral he has attended in the last decade or so. Funny how those ones seem to really catch his mind....
-- Ryan Cousineau rcousine@sfu.ca http://www.wiredcola.com/ "I don't want kids who are thinking about going into mathematics to think that they have to take drugs to succeed." -Paul Erdos
It's interesting how the AHZs always try to frame the debate around
arguments like "xyz country instituted a helmet law and injuries and
fatalities didn't go down, or went up." They are either unable, or
unwilling, to look at the big picture and all the other factors that
come into play in population studies.
But whole-population benefits are the ones for which MHLs are
presumably being instituted. If there are no such benefits, then
there is no valid excuse for lawmakers to require cyclists to wear
helmets.
And of course we have the problem that politicians - like those in California - cannot or will not do the maths; instead they look to the electorate (cue Bill "I dont need data to make a decision" Sornson), see that they are starting, due to manufacturers' propaganda, to wear helmets; and hey presto, they introduce an MHL.
Cycling isn't dangerous enough to require helmets, even if they did work.
About 100 years of TdF racing. Roughly 2000 miles per year. Roughly
100 riders per year, average. That's 20 million miles ridden, very
roughly, and probably considerably more.
Two fatalities. One was drug induced, and a helmet would have had
absolutely no effect. The other is disputed; helmet fans say it would
have saved his life, skeptics say hitting your face into a concrete
post at high speed kills you, helmet or no.
No matter. That's a _maximum_ of one fatality per 20 million miles of
racing at the highest level, including extreme speeds on mountain
descents.
The only problem with this information is that certain people don't
understand how large the number 20 million really is.
I suggest our innumerate friends borrow a calculator and divide 20
million by their own annual mileage. That would be the number of
years it would take to ride that far.
Yes, the calculator is correct. It's many thousands of years.
- Frank Krygowski
The Tour de France is not a good example because the roads are cleared of traffic, traffic islands are removed and barriers put up to keep pedestrians off the road. Cycling is less dangerous when you take the idiots off the road.
