"Frank Palermo" <
[email protected]> wrote in message
news:
[email protected]...
> It
> seems to me that the chief cause of road fatalities is someone driving
like
> a prat (i.e. in such a way that the actual risk of crashing is
unacceptably
> high).
Many years ago a Transport Minister said that crashes are in the main caused
noit by the taking of large risks, but by the taking of small risks very
large numbers of times. I think there's a good deal of truth in that.
Obviously the average boy racer is a crash waiting to happen, but the people
most likely to crash (mileage adjusted) are company car drivers, especially
commercial travellers, whose risk taking is much less overt.
> That is, behaviour and cultural modification will have a far greater
> effect of bringing down the incidence of fatalities than any amount of
> airbags, seatbelts, helmets, etc. Those protective devices merely guard
> (to varying degrees of success) against high-risk behaviours.
Or rather they allow drivers to drive less safely for the same level of
personal risk.
> if I'm cycling at 25km/hr, and
> a car pulls out on me, I'll hit the brakes (if I had time... this isn't an
> exact science so, unlike others, I'm not pretending it is) and possibly
> decelerate to 10km/hr by the time I actually hit the car. I'm below the 12
> km/hr someone mentioned earlier
Now add the acceleration due to gravity, and the relative movement of the
car...
But the principal point is that helmets are primarily designed to protect
against impacts *which were survivable anyway*.
> (Close to finishing now!). I think the debate goes off track too often as
> people expect safety devices to eliminate, not reduce risk. No device can
> eliminate risk, only reduce. Why bag helmets so much because they fail to
> do what they never claimed to do?
Because they don't do what their advocates claim them to do either.
Evidence form around the world shows no correlation between helmet use and
head injury rates. Plotting pedestrian and cyclist injury rates in New
Zealand over the peirod of introduction of the law, you can't tell which
trend line is which - but there is a large jump in helmet wearing at one
point for the cyclist and not the pedestrian community.
> There was never a claim of 100% protection,
No, the figures used are between 85% and 90% - but whole population studies
never show anythign like that benefit.
> but surely limited protection is better than none?
Unless the act of protecting induces greater risk taking which increases the
overall level of risk. What happens if wearing a helmet eliminates the
probability of a trivial injury but increases the probability of a serious
crash by 5%? Is that a good outcome?
> I think we get hung up
> over ideologies of forced helmet wearing and matters of convenience and
> comfort rather than truly examining any benefits or lack of benefits to be
> derived from wearing the things.
The only ideology involved is the True Believers who insist that we should
all wear plastic hats because middle class American kids riding offroad with
helmets were less likely to suffer head injuries than working class black
kids riding round inner city streets without them. In order to keep it
simple for us they don't confuse us with the fact that the figures of 85%
and 88% they use were amended (substantially downwards) by the original
authors in 1996.
Guy
===
WARNING: may contain traces of irony. Contents may settle after posting.
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