10 Wheels

One may keep you from Dyeing in the crash. Ten Weeks after my Crash. Surgery to Stop a Bleed,

njkayaker

You are completely missing the point.

I made no comment about whether or not helmets are useful.

But they won't prevent you from dying in every cycling crash.

Outlawing cycling would.

You should be advocating that.

10 Wheels

I ride for the exercise.
.

mr_pedro

This reminds me of a comment I read a while back: rather than an airbag in the steering wheel, what would prevent many more deadly accidents in cars would be a big dagger sticking out of the steering wheel.


Joking aside, the point with helmets is that in a cycling accident, helmets prevent some deaths, they don't prevent most deaths and most of the time they have no impact or prevent only minor scratches. The part that helmets prevent some deaths is the reason why there is such a heated discussion when people choose not to wear a helmet. Depending on the type of cycling activity you can be much more or less likely to fall of your bike, together with your risk tolerance you can then come to a decision if you want to wear a helmet or not.


In the mean time what is more effective for cyclist safety is a culture change where cycling infrastructure is totally integrated in the road system and accepted as a means of transport. It is also a chicken and the egg problem, where you need enough cyclists to make it safe and if it is not safe you will not get enough cyclists. This is where a government steps in that is able to allocate public money keeping long-term goals in mind for the general benefit of the people, which requires people accepting to pay for something they will not immediately benefit from.

njkayaker

You and hundreds of others have made the same comment. It's been around for a long while.

Safety equipment in cars appears to have reduced fatalities.

Seems like this will take a long while in the US (being optimistic). What do you do until then?

Koyote

I get what mr_pedro is suggesting - that we need enough cyclists to demand better infrastructure. But in response to njkayaker 's comment, I have found that I feel safer in areas with fewer cyclists. When I lived in Colorado, in an area that was lousy with cyclists, it seemed like the motorists didn't notice me; we were just part of the landscape. Since then, I have lived in rural cities, with few riders in-town and even fewer out in the countryside; in these areas, a cyclist is a novelty, and motorists notice me and give me wide berth - almost always.

mr_pedro

It is analogue to your comment on a bike ban preventing even more accidents, while still not the solution we should look for.
In the Netherlands, where I currently live, there is a conscious decision not only to make bike helmets not mandatory, but also to not put any emphasize on a need to wear helmets. The reasoning is that in order to tell people to wear helmets you have to tell them that cycling is dangerous, which in itself will have less people using the bicycle, causing negative health consequences of itself. In stead they make sure cycling is safe by design of the infrastructure, by education of drivers and education of children in schools taking cycling exams at the age of 10.

I lived in the US for a couple of years and cycled a lot while living in Baltimore. Once a month there was the bike party to create awareness, where a couple of thousand cyclists would take to the streets into multiple lanes and cycle around downtown. I don't know how much that helps the cause as it only made drivers angry. I guess every region has its own issues, in Washington DC it looked like traffic was much more used to cyclists.

cutdbeard

I've seen so many accidents while I'm riding and most of accidents I saw are all wearing helmets so head injury was lessened, the only problem also is some don't wear any knee pads or any body protectors. I am hoping as much as people prioritize wearing helmets, they would also be protected from their other body parts.

Koyote

Sounds like Critical Mass.

njkayaker

The Netherlands is very different from the US generally. Doing the same thing (now) might not have the same risk/benefit in the two places.

"Making the US like the Netherlands" avoids mentioning how to do that and ignores what to do in the mean time.

A couple of thousand people is a small number. There's definitely differences in attitudes in the US.

njkayaker

In the Netherlands, many drivers ride bicycles and certainly know lots of people who ride. Cycling is considered normal there.

In the US, it's considered unusual and out-of-place. Many drivers don't drive and many of them might not know anybody who rides "seriously". Fewer cyclists is easier to deal with. "Lousy with cyclists" means more of the things US drivers would rather not have to deal with.

mr_pedro

Sure there are differences, another thing that comes to mind is that in the Netherlands most people on a bike are just using it as transportation and are wearing regular clothes, no helmet and typically go not too fast between 10-13 mph. While people on road bikes/mountainbikes are exercising and wearing lycra and all wear helmets. In the US you might see more people in bike gear going faster also those that are commuting, for which it could make more sense to include a helmet with the rest of the bike gear they are wearing.

What is the same though, is that most of what kills you when on a bike is getting hit by a car, for which a helmet doesn’t help much.

njkayaker

There are many differences. Some minor; some major. But they all add-up making a big difference. Another difference is people in many places in the US are going longer distances more routinely and in some places there are real hills.

It's seems many people think that all collisions with cars are at high speeds.

Many (likely most) collisions are much lower speeds and helmets might help in some cases. It's not likely that helmets would make it worse.

The fact is that we don't have enough data to really know. But it doesn't seem unreasonable (to me) that helmets can be better than nothing in some cases.

GlennR

What about motorcycles?

mr_pedro

It seems many people don't understand the logical implications of saying that most of what kills you on a bike is being hit by a car.

I have no doubt that in almost all cases you are not worse off wearing a helmet on a bike.
Point I am trying to make is that there are more effective ways of reducing deadly bike accidents than focusing on helmets.
Small things that can already help without big investments in infrastructure, is to change the mindset of drivers that cyclists are in their way and don't belong on the roads. For example with public campaigns, signs and road markings.

Yup, being hit by a motorcycle is not healthy either.

njkayaker

But that doesn't mean all car accidents will kill you (which is the part you skip over). What percentage of car collisions result in death? You don't know (no one knows).

Helmets might still be useful in car collisions.
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What you are suggesting isn't as easy or quick to do as you appears to think.

Some these have been done in the US for many years. Since you appear to think the current situation in the US isn't good, these measures also don't work as well as you think they do.

(I'm not saying we shouldn't do these other things but they aren't likely to be as effective or easy as some people think.)

njkayaker

https://www.statista.com/statistics/...es%20in%202019.

​​​​​​203 cyclist road fatalities with 17 million people in the Netherlands in 2019.

857 cyclist fatalities (2018) with 328 million people in the US.

Cycling in the Netherlands isn't anywhere as safe as people seem to think.

Of course, cycling is very common in the Netherlands and very rare in the US.

But the 4 fold larger rate is still surprising: it would be equivalent to 4000 deaths in the US.

The relative rates are reversed for overall traffic fatalities.

660 in the Netherlands and 37,000 in the US.

The US rate is "only" 2 fold higher. Still lower than one might expect from an impression that people in the Netherlands ride bikes "all the time" and don't "drive much".

There are about 8 million passenger cars in the Netherlands (5/10) and 273 million in the US (8/10).
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mr_pedro

That's from the 20-fold population, which is not the right way to compare in this case.

​​​​The only way to check the relative mortality is by comparing deaths per mile.
US has 3.3 trillion car miles per year and 37k deaths, while NL has 5.4 billion car miles per year and 660 deaths. That means overall traffic deaths per car mile is ~1.5 times higher in the US.

For cycling, the 200 deaths per year are for 1 billion miles cycled in the Netherlands, to get to an equivalent US number you would need to know the miles cycled in the US.

GlennR

It can be deadly.
https://www.newsday.com/long-island/...ide-1.10575517
"Scarpati was killed by drunken motorcyclist James Ryan, 50, who veered off Wantagh Parkway on July 20, 2009, and struck him as he fixed a flat near the bike path along the highway, police said."

Koyote

A bit such data here, but it does not look very current or reliable.

I’ve long been amazed at the paucity of data on cycling safety. For instance, reliable studies on the efficacy of helmets, daytime running lights, etc.

njkayaker

I took that into account.

At the rate of the fatalities in the Netherlands, the US would have 4000 cyclist deaths (rather than 800).

Even that's not fair because the cycling (as you pointed out) is different too.

As I said:

Of course, cycling is very common in the Netherlands and very rare in the US.

Using these numbers, it's

1.12E-08 deaths/mile for the US.

1.22222E-07 deaths/mile for the Netherlands (10 times more).

njkayaker

The events are relatively rare and there's less economic value in pursuing the studies.

Seems expected to me.

mr_pedro

Ok, how did you get to 4000?

That is how it works, you scale the numbers by distance travelled and any differences left can be attributed to the cycle environment/behavior in both countries


Sorry the 5.4 billion number I had quoted is actually car miles per million people. In NL we drive about half the miles per person compared to the US, for a total of 92.3 billion miles. The factor of 1.5 still stands.

CargoDane

Miles-travelled is the only one that makes sense.
If you do it by population, rather than how many miles were travelled per fatality, any niche activity will look safer than it is.

If you do it by population, you don't even take into account how many actually do the activity and compare that. Doing it per miles-travelled does in a roundabout way.
No one who has ridden both in the Netherlands (or Denmark) and the US will say that it is safer to ride in the US. There's a huge, huge difference.

njkayaker

203/17,000,000*330,000,000 = 3940.

That makes more sense.
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