Mojo31

80 in July.

pepperbelly

That’s our low in July. 😄

RoadWearier

That's ridiculous. I put it on my head and wore it for about ten minutes to adjust it to see if it fit. If I didn't like it, I would have returned it. No sweat in it. No crashes. What do you think happens to helmets at your LBS? I'm guessing you are anti-Amazon. That's ok. You are entitled to your own opinion, I guess.

Mojo31

Yeah, I’ve observed that “hot” and “cold” mean different things to different people. Over the years when looking for clothing and helmet info, I’ve learned to disregard posters in colder climates. When it’s 60 here, I’m putting on a jacket. When it’s 60 in North Dakota, they are donning swim suits and jumping into icy lakes. 😜

No right or wrong, just different.

pepperbelly

Yeah, I get cold under about 65*.

veganbikes

How is that ridiculous? You may have done that maybe but you don't know what someone else has done. In terms of my local shop and all the shops I have worked at in the past (and pretty much all the shops I have ever asked in my travels) we don't take returns on helmets for the very reason that someone could do as I have described and then I have a dead helmet on my hands that would go in the trash and I am out money or I have the option to do something unethical and sell your used helmet which nobody but some very expensive equipment not worth time or money could really determine. Helmets are a safety item not a pair of slacks from the Gap. I cannot just wash out a crash.

People do stupid things and return stuff all the time to places like Amazon and Amazon takes those items and resells them why wouldn't they, it is more profit for them and a way to get rid of stuff they would otherwise throw away now they are making a buck on it and you might not know or if you find out you will probably still spend money with them over and over because they will have you hooked.

I am against companies that knowingly and willingly sell fake and knockoff products, that treat their workers like garbage (or don't consider them workers to get out of caring for them) and make billions upon billions of dollars off the backs of others if you are for that by all means you are entitled to your opinion just know where your money goes and who it supports.

AirPhantomPhoto

Sorry to say then you are against most if not all corporations especially here in the good ole US of A. All the top folks & shareholders really care about is the bottom line & how many millions of dollars they get.

As for amazon selling used gear like helmets, not too sure if they have a try & buy program or not. I know when I was looking at helmets the ones I was looking at did not offer that option. But they sell so many different types & styles I didnt look at them all obviously & I didnt go to my LBS because they didnt have the price point or color I wanted. Yup, old school here, never wore a helmet as a kid or while I was stationed overseas in the 90s, I'm only going to wear one when I have to for bike tours. My state doesnt require it as I'm well over the age of 16.

My choice, but considering I've been physically hit by a town car, have been in a accident that had 50-75 lb boxes slam me in the back, neck & head while I was driving due to an idiot running my work minivan off the road, & then another car accident I was lucky to walk away from.. heaven doesnt want me & hades is afraid I'd take over. When its my time its my time.

SpedFast

I personally would never knowingly buy a used helmet for a number of reasons, but I have noticed how many are sold through 2nd hand stores, thrift shops, and others, just to name a few. While I've donated bikes and parts, I never donate helmets.

RiceAWay

This grows tiresome, Helmets do NOTHING at protecting your life because they were not designed to protect your life,.And a helmet so designed would be something like 6' in diameter. That would make the helmet a greater threat to the rider than the danger from cars.

As for saving lives here is a study showing that helmets do NOTHNG to protect you from cars https://www.vehicularcyclist.com/kunich.html

I have gone back and checked to see if anything has changed and it has not.

But this is NOT the problem. If a car hits you at just 35 mph you are DEAD. Cars commonly exceed 35 mph even in school zones. So pretending that your body can withstand that sort of shock is simply ridiculous.

But I nevertheless recommend helmets because helmets were not designed to save you if you were hit by a car. They were designed to save you for the other 95% of accidents - the fall overs. The ones like I had - a funny noise coming from the front wheel and I bent over while riding to see what it was - it was the carbon fiber fork failing and as I bent over with my head only 24 inches above the ground, the fork exploded and dumped me directly on my forehead. I was wearing a helmet and if I were not my skull would have fractured. that would not likely have killed me but the ER doctors would have taken my injury as a serious injury rather than simply being knocked out for 5 minutes.

Instead because helmets are designed to prevent skull fractures rather than moderate concussions, I had no external signs of serious injury.

The injury from the concussion was so bad that I was having a type of seizure which diabetics often have - I could not remember having the seizure and so was unaware of them., My brothers were totally ignorant of what a seizure is and one thought that I was simply getting very mad and the other thought I was going crazy. Finally a cop friend got me to Stanford Medical Center because I could not even remember to eat and had lost 42% of my body weight, My cop friend thought it must be cancer but the doctors ruled that out and recommended one of the professors of neurology who had a small local practice as well as teaching.

He had never seen a concussion that bad and the only way to treat it was with drugs. So I will spend the rest of my life taking maximum doses of two medications twice a day for about $8,000 a year to control it and these are the CHEAP medications. After 10 years, I am more or less normal except for the side effects of those drugs.

Now, in the meantime, Trek under the auspices of the Bontrager brand name has invented the 3D printed Wavecell helmet which is designed specifically to decelerate the head below the concussion rate. I have fallen off once with it and indeed it appeared to work. The shock didn't even make me dizzy.

Also other idiots have claimed that the injuries from the neck being twisted and replied with the MIPS helmets which have a mounting that will twist in a collision. I am extremely doubtful of this and indeed the Wavecell doesn't need these sorts of mountings since of the controlled deceleration.

The take home from the study and analysis of the study, and the personal experience is that you should wear a helmet of your own volition and it appears without further proof that the Bontrager Wavecell helmet is more intelligently designed than the old foam helmets. Helmets should not be mandatory since the manner in which many people ride simply doesn't require a helmet. Head injuries are rare and mandatory helmet laws are made in the belief that helmets can protect you in an automobile collision.

Also I would like you to know that neurologists are not the same. Most of them treat various dementias and soon forget anything they ever knew about concussions. I had gone to several neurologists on the recommendation of my private doctor and most of them were useless. Dementias, in general, can only be slowed and not stopped and these neurologists get pretty fixated on the idea that they can in the end do nothing. So there are good and bad neurologists to treat a concussion vs.dementia and you have to be aware of that and find the proper one. I was lucky to be near Stanford Medical Center where some of the very best doctors are.

Iride01 

Pretending that all cars will hit a cyclist at 35 mph or more is also tiresome.
Pretending that a helmet will not help protect a cyclist from some of the accidents they have is also tiresome.

I'd most certainly be dead if I hadn't had a helmet on back in July of 2019. I didn't get hit by a car. I was all alone... except for the doe that jumped out of the brush and knocked me off my bike when I was doing more than 20mph.

curbtender

If you get hit at 35mph and don't go under the car then I'd say that helmet will probably do something to reduce your injury.

tomato coupe

Putting your opinions on a page with flags at the top and then posting it on a website somewhere does not magically turn it into a "study."

pepperbelly

The skull on the sides is thin enough that you can fracture your skull if you fall over while stopped and hit a curb.
Helmets don’t make you invulnerable but they greatly increase your chances of surving.

shelbyfv

Bummer. It's surprising your Doc is supportive of you continuing to ride.

Koyote

That is not a study...and even if it were, it doesn't even pretend to reach that conclusion.

79pmooney

If I wasn't wearing a helmet in 1977, I wouldn't have been alive over the years of that study. And that crash was from a bike failure, not risky riding.

And yes, tight better helmets, risks are taken that weren't before. We see this in ice hockey. When I was growing up, none of the pros wore helmets, let alone masks. Everyone knew the risk of death was real every time they stepped onto the ice. Players kept their sticks down, much more so than today. But a safer game? (OEM teeth were a rare commodity, much more common now.)

Trakhak

That explains why helmetless brakeless fixie ninjas are invariably the most cautious cyclists of all.

tomato coupe

The poster that cited the "study" wrote the study, so don't waste any time debating the conclusion.

shelbyfv

^^^Good catch, what a joke!!

TC1

You are actually completely correct here, although better evidence exists than what you provided.

As you noted, cyclist helmet usage in the US is just over 30% -- 32, in fact, in the most-recent year that I checked. Not coincidentally, the percentage of cyclist fatalities who were helmeted when they crashed, is also 32%. Those two numbers both increase by a percent every couple of years, but they have marched in lock-stop ever since anyone thought to track them.

That is the precise statistical signature of a placebo -- which is exactly what current bicycle helmets are. They do not save any lives, and they never have.

Now I realize that everyone who has ever cracked a helmet is utterly convinced that they would be dead without it -- but that is not the case. And the statistical proof that such belief is nothing but wishful thinking could not be more clear, as previously shown. As a species, we still lack the ability to manufacture ~200 gram devices that can be secured to a human head with a little plastic buckle, that do anything except make the wearer feel safer. It would be great if we achieved that level of technology, but we are not there, nor are we particularly close.

That is not to say that all helmets are useless, by the way. Helmets which can save your life do exist, but they are motorcycle or 'special application' helmets. When we inspect the same statistics for motorcyclists, we find that current usage in the US is about 67%, and only 55% of motorcyclist fatalities were helmeted when killed. That ~12% represents the effectiveness of motorcycle helmets -- not great, but it at least exists, unlike with bicycle helmets. This should surprise no one who has ever held each type of helmet in their hands. The former typically contains ~2 inches of thick, soft padding, inside a complete shell with a visor and often, and full-face protection. The latter is about a quarter-inch of hard styrofoam, partially covered by a thin shell of plastic -- and woefully insufficient for the task.

This dichotomy exists because the engineering priorities for bicycle helmets are "light, cool, cheap, and safe" -- in that order. And if you choose to wear a bicycle helmet instead of a motorcycle helmet, you agree.

By the way, the statistical signature of a safety device that really does work can be found by investigating seat belts. In the US, seat belt usage is about 92%, and only about 45% of occupant fatalities were belted in. That's not a placebo -- unlike bicycle helmets.

The bottom line is that every cyclist who preaches about the necessity of wearing a helmet and who does not wear at least a motorcycle-rated lid, is a hypocrite. And wearing a useless helmet in public when not racing is detrimental to the collective safety of cyclists, as well, further increasing the hypocrisy of that action.

curbtender

Ok, tell that to the guy who had a front blowout on a test ride without a helmet and is now missing an ear and has chronic headaches. I guess if you don't die it's all good.

TC1

Bicycle helmets do not prevent concussions or other brain injury -- and if you are serious about promoting safety, you would not make such unfounded statements in public.

Preventing concussions is quite a difficult ask for any safety equipment. I once suffered a mild concussion in a relatively low-speed T-bone automotive crash, in which I was secured with a 5-point harness and wearing an SA-rated helmet. My helmet contacted a properly-padded section of the car's roll cage, and that resulted in a concussion despite every precaution having been taken. On the other hand, I also suffered no injury in a different situation, where my helmet did not survive impact with a bare roll cage tube in a friend's car. There is quite a bit of luck involved with the incidence of brain injury, and bicycle helmets are insufficient factors to effect that luck. This is why we study statistics, and not stories.

And to your anecdote about the ear, many hats would address that. My cousin went OTB wearing a ski cap. Destroyed the hat, but he was fine. And the plural of anecdote is still not "data", by the way.

pepperbelly

Why would anyone advocate to not use a piece of safety equipment?
A bicycle helmet probably won’t do much if a car hits you- but it might. It can help a minor fall from being worse. All we can do is try to mitigate damage.
Think of it like disc brakes. They don’t completely eliminate problems but they give you a better chance.
If you don’t like wearing a helmet then don't wear one. But don’t try to talk someone else into not wearing one.

curbtender

That was someone I know who regrets the whole situation. I understand not wanting mandatory laws but preaching that helmets are useless is beyond my scope.

Eric F 

Over the course of my life, I've banged my head against a lot of things, sometimes while riding a bicycle. It's always been better while wearing a helmet. I don't care what some study says. I'm going to wear a helmet while riding a bike because my own common sense and personal experience tells me that not wearing a helmet is dumb (for me, YMMV).