Mark Shroyer said:I'll go ahead and state the obvious: A modern car offers
excellent built-in protection against moderate-speed impacts,
including seat belts, multiple airbags, active head restraints
(in Hondas anyway), and most importantly a solid frame around
your entire body with crumple zones in the front and rear.
Two points: First, you seem to be unaware that the "solid frame" is
what people's heads run into during a car crash. It's what smashes
their brains.
Second, do you never ride in a pre-airbag car? What do you do then?
As an example: When my daughter married, a good friend loaned us a
beautiful old classic car from his collection, to trasnport the couple
from the wedding to the reception hall. Those crazy, risk-taking
kids didn't wear helmets. Go figure!
What would you have done?
Quoted message said:A helmet doesn't add a whole lot to that.
Yet head injuries remain the number one cause of auto fatalities. And
I'll note that there _has_ been at least one study that concluded that
a simple car helmet would save lives and be very cost effective.
http://www.monash.edu.au/muarc/reports/atsb160.html
Quoted message said:And don't pretend that the question of whether or not you hit
the pavement is entirely a matter of your skill as a cyclist.
On this newsgroup there are constantly stories of cyclists being
hit by negligent drivers; in those threads, nobody makes foolish
arguments that the cyclist was at fault for not being careful
enough.An anecdote involving my ex-roommate provides a good example...
We can trade anecdotes. I can talk about the friends I've seen slip
or trip and fall while walking, or the times it's happened to me. I
can detail the injuries of a friend who fell on a lunch hour walk and
ended up in the ER, blackened and bruised all around the face. I can
talk about the pedestrian I saw hit by a car, flung at least six feet
in the air.
But anecdotes are not data. The logical question involves real risk
per hour exposure - and for ordinary cycling, it's not high enough to
require protective equipment.
That's why bike helmets were never considered necessary for ordinary
riding until Bell began its major marketing/horror campaign in the
1970s. That's why they're still not considered necessary in places
where people routinely use bikes for real transportation. It's only
in places like the US and Australia, where biking is rare, that the
majority seem to think cycling is a high-risk activity.
Again, the fearmongering campaign works, at least on those who don't
know better.
Quoted message said:
One other argument I'd like to attack, which I keep seeing pop
up in this and similar threads, is that helmets aren't rated for
30 MPH collision, ergo if you're riding at 30 MPH then wearing a
helmet won't do you any good. Bull$hit. If you're clipped and
fall off your bike, the speed at which you hit the ground is
mostly a function of the acceleration of gravity from your
position on top of your bike down to the pavement, regardless of
your horizontal velocity.
And yet, a conflicting argument has been used to try to promote MHLs.
Specifically, when a kids MHL was being proposed in my state, the
helmeteers had an article distributed to all the major newspapers.
The headline was a variation on "If only he'd worn his helmet." It
described a 12-year-old boy who was hit head on by a Chevy Blazer.
They claimed a helmet would have saved him.
The boy was riding south in the northbound lane, BTW. So it was a
direct, head-on collision. Far beyond the 14 mph impact for which a
helmet is certified to protect the decapitated headform they use in
the test.
And no, the articles never mentioned that the kid shouldn't have
ridden facing traffic. Real safety information can't be allowed to
distract from helmet promotion, you see...
- Frank Krygowski