Bike helmets: what the science really says about an American safety obsession.

We have a rule in our family:

If there are wheels under your feet, there is a helmet on your head.

I’m a strong advocate of bike helmets. I've personally avoided serious injury on multiple occasions because I was wearing a bike helmet. I've had solo spills on my bike, I've rubbed tires with other cyclists, I've had absent minded drivers push me off the road, and I've even had aggressive drivers intentionally cut me off or even hit their brakes as hard as possible causing me to crash into the back of the car and go over my handlebars. I've been lucky to avoid any serious injuries, but I've paid my respects to a handful of helmets for doing their job to protect my head.

With that context, this article seemed to suggest that helmet wearing wasn't really useful so I needed to dig in. There are only three meaningful items in here:

1. Data shows that in Seattle laws that required helmet use were disproportionately enforced against minorities. Sadly, this isn't special about bike helmets. That is true of many laws.
2. Highlight from the end of the article: "Regardless, experts I spoke to were unanimous about what these flaws don’t mean: that helmets are useless. They all believe you should wear one."
3. It seems drivers interpret helmets as safer to be close to? "Notably, Walker discovered, motorists and commercial truck drivers in particular afforded less space—not more—to helmeted cyclists." However, the reverse of this is not to suggest that you should skip a helmet.

The rest of this article is just highlighting that there are risks to being on a bicycle in traffic, and a helmet doesn't solve all of them. Which should be news to absolutely nobody.

At one point the article highlights that other countries that do not have helmet laws have fewer accidents, and specifically goes to the Netherlands example.

From a zoomed-out perspective, helmets are simply not the road-safety panacea we want them to be. Several analyses suggest that U.S. riders are more likely to wear helmets compared with cyclists in other countries—all while suffering the highest fatality rate per distance traveled. Research shows that among a 14-country cohort, the Netherlands enjoyed the lowest bicyclist fatality rate per mile traveled. The Dutch also largely eschew the helmet: 73 percent of adults and 84 percent of children in the Netherlands report they never wear a helmet while bicycling. There’s a simple reason for that. Surveys show that Dutch residents feel safe biking, and attribute that sense of security to the country’s long-standing cycling culture and network of dedicated cycling lanes.

This again has nothing to do with helmets. What the Netherlands tells us is the thing you can do to change driver behavior in a way that makes it safer for cyclists is to have so many cyclists on the road that you can’t ignore them.

So, I stand by…

If there are wheels under your feet, there is a helmet on your head.