On Sun, 25 Apr 2004 00:22:20 +0100, Gonzalez
Quoted message said:I'm not questioning your figures. It's the misleading
presentation which I raise objection to.
IN what way is it misleading? I don't think anyone here
is misled.
Quoted message said:*Five times more child pedestrians are killed than child
cyclists* implies that being a child pedestrian at any
given moment is five times more dangerous than being a
child cyclist.
No it doesn't, it implies that focusing on bicycle helmets
is a distraction from the overall problem.
Right now the state of knowledge is road traffic accounts
for 10% of child injury admissions but 50% of fatalities. We
know that cyclists are about 15% of the child road traffic
fatality figure (and remember pedestrians are in potential
conflict mainly when crossing roads). We know that around
10% of that number suffer serious injuries to parts of the
head covered by a helmet, and assuming the Government's
figures to be correct (despite lack of real-world evidence
to back them) we know that at most we can expect around 10%
of these injuries to be prevented if all child cyclists wear
helmets. This equates to roughly one life per year, out of
the hundred or so children killed on the roads, and a few
tens of serious injuries prevented. And remember that this
assumes that (a) no injuries will be made worse by helmets,
which is controversial; (b) no cyclist will ride more
carelessly as a result of being helmeted, which is
controversial; (c) helmets are properly worn, which studies
show is the case in under 5% of cases.
£400,000 of public money has been given to BeHIT, who have
come up with claims for a child healt law like "100,000
child cycling injuries per year", "20,000 tragedies per
year", "2bn saved annually" and so on. Every one of these
has been debunked. Meanwhile the cyclist saety agenda is
continually dominated by the single issue of plastic hats.
Back in the real world, it is blindingly obvious that more
serious child injuries will be saved by measures which
reduce danger at source. It is also obvious that, given that
a majority of children who die cycling have suffered at
least one life-threatening non-head injury, helmets have
limited potential to effect improvement. And the fiction
that helmets prevent death in crashes with motor cars is
alive and well and living in Reading, thanks to this
generously public funded single-issue pressure group.
As far as I'm concerned, having started from a pro-
compulsion standpoint for children at least, I am now
firmly convinced that helmets are a long way down the
list of things we should be doing to make cycling safer.
A long way down.
The BHF has a blanket ban on unhelmetd riders on its charity
rides. Does it have a blanket ban on riders with defective
brakes? They will see if you are wearing a plastic hat; will
they see if your bike is roadworthy? What makes more sense,
riding a roadworthy bike, or wearing a plastic hat in the
pious hope that it wil protect you fromt he consequences of
failure to do so? The emphasis on helmets is completely
irrational.
Quoted message said:Quoted message said:common sense, backed by the best available evidence, tells
me that the source of danger has four wheels, not two.
Quoted message said:We'll just have to disagree here. I firmly believe that a
child wearing a helmet is less likely to suffer head injury
than a child without a helmet.
Figures from the real world show the opposite. I would like
to know why. I have asked the Gubmint, but they seem
curiously uninterested. They would rather pay BeHIT some
more of my money to produce another paper quoting Thompson,
Rivara asnd Thompson.
Quoted message said:Children in the Scottish Islands wear life jackets to get
to school.
They cross choppy water in a boat. How many children can
swim in the sea, fully clothed, for long enough to be
rescued if their boat capsizes?
Quoted message said:Children taken to school on the back of dad's motorcycle
wear helmets.
A very small subset of children, obv., since riding pillion
is illegal below the age of 14. Now look at the fatality
rate per mile of motorcyclists. I put it to you that it is
the highest of any road user type, by a country mile.
Quoted message said:Children walking to school wear high visibility jackets.
To prevent being hit. Children on bikes wear hi-viz jackets,
too. How many crashes does a helmet prevenet? Er, none. Oh.
How many crashes would be rpevented by slowing the cars
down? Ah. Why force questionable protective measures on a
small subset of victims?
Quoted message said:Many believed there was no proven link between smoking
and cancer.
And it was whole-population studies (of the type whih show
no benefit from increased helemt use) which proved that the
link existed, against the evidence of small-scale industry
funded studies which said it didn't. Guess who funded
Thompson, Rivara and Thompson?
Quoted message said:I suggest you have no credible evidence to support a claim
that more injuries are caused by poor maintenance than by
the absence of a helmet.
I don't need any. All I need to do is show, as I have done,
that no serious attempt has been made to assess the
relative merits.
Quoted message said:Besides, I hadn't prioritised the risks.
Apart from by placing helmets alone with an exclamation mark
and lumping all the other things together at the end in a
by-the-way stylee.
Quoted message said:What about the relative possible consequences? Absence of a
puncture repair kit on a trip to the shops is unlikely to
have impact on the severity of any injury sustained.
And international evidence shows that neither is absence
of a helmet.
Quoted message said:Quoted message said:Right now on the BBC children's website the brother of a
boy who died riding off the pavement into the path of a
car on a bike with defective brakes, is pushing helmets. I
want to know what heartless [censored] told this grieving
family that if only "they" (the omnipresent "they" who
should do something about congestion and heart disease)
had forced their child to wear a helmet, he would be alive
today. It is a harsh reality, but one which they need to
face: if the bike had been properly maintained and the boy
riding legally, that crash would not have happened.
Instead of campaigning for magic hats which are admitted
by their makers to ineffective in crashes involviong motor
vehicles, they should be promoting maintenance and
roadcraft. They are not. They are admiring the Emperor's
New Helmet.
Quoted message said:That still doesn't imply that promotion of helmets is
wrong.
Here's what happened.
Some people who had already made up their minds compared two
entirely different groups of cyclists and concluded that the
difference in injury rates was solely due to helmet use.
Their figure of 88% (+12/-28) has since been used by a
number of campaigners to push for helmet use and compulsion.
Some countries have approached 100% helmet use. Their
cyclist injury rates per mile remain the same.
One country has reached 50% helemt use. Their cyclist injury
rates have gone up 40%.
One country has introduced a law just like the one proposed
here. Their child cyclist injury rate has doubled.
Each of these countries experienced a reduction in
cycling while helmets were being aggressively promoted
and/or mandated.
Some other countries have virtually no helmet use. They have
the best cyclist safety records in the world.
The UK has seen steadily improving cyclist safety as
cycling levels increase. Helmet use is more or less static.
The period when cyclist safety dropped most sharply in
recent times, the late 1980s, coincided with a sharp rise
in helmet use.
In London the congestion chanrge has increased cycling and
massively reduced injury rates. Helmet use has if anything
dropped slightly.
TRL state that helemt promotion appears to conicide with a
reduction in cycling levels. This is hardly surprising since
all the helmet promotion in the UK is based on scare
tactics. In order to propose a solution, first they must
invent a problem. And all the time the overall picture -
that most fatalities and serious injuries are caused by
motor traffic, which kills many more pedestrians than
cyclists - is studiously ignored.
When helmet compulsionists are asked to account for the
failure of whole population figures to show benefit from
increased helemt wearing rates their response is "we think
people aren't wearing them properly". There is a Dilbert
cartoon in which the punchline is "does that work?" "We
think people are doing it wrong."
I think, based on the above evidence, that in the case of
serious injuries, helmets are essentially irrelevant (or
they cause or exacerbate as many injuries as they prevent,
which amounts to the same thing). I can see absolutely no
justification for promoting helmets in the figures from
Australia, New Zealand, USA, Canada, the UK, Netherlands,
Denmark, Germany or anywhere else. There is simply no robust
evidence showing any significant effect on serious injuries.
So helmets are in the same bag as gloves, or knee pads for
tinies on their first two-wheeler. Nice to have if you
should happen to fall off, might prevent a nasty bruise or a
headache, no more than that.
--
Guy
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May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after
posting. chapmancentral.co.ukchapmancentral.co.ukOpen ↗
88% of helmet statistics are made up, 65% of them at
Washington University
