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Reminder: Wear a helmet!
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this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2024
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I've never heard of a single person who has regretted wearing a helmet, yet people are still incredibly resistant to the idea.
I just don't get it.
I spoke with a guy, strong cycling supporter with influence in our local government. He made it clear that he views helmets are unnecessary "with safe cycling infrastructure."
While I get the logic, the reality is that a large number of crashes (reported as half) are single bike accidents with no involvement of another vehicle (i.e. car).
This is why, even when you look at the underreported stats from the Netherlands, cyclists have very high rates of head injuries. They don't wear helmets, have the gold-standard cycling infrastructure, yet crack their head open.
The point is, don't be stupid and just wear a damn helmet.
One of the most absurd things I've gotten heavily downvoted for on reddit is for saying people should wear helmets no matter how good the cycling infrastructure is. Not that it should be mandated by law, but that it's simply the wise thing to do. Then people are like 'wELL I gUeSs YoU ShOUld THeN wEaR a HElmEt whiLE walKinG tOo'
Fine, then don't wear a helmet. It's not my head.
I didn't use to wear one when I was a kid either but nowdays it feels like driving without a seatbelt. Hell, I might even just take my bike for a test drive around the block after having done some adjustments on it and I still go grab my helmet first.
I don't think people really understand just how devastating head injuries can be, and just how easy it is to get a tbi when on a surface as hard as concrete.
Even when doing something as simple as walking/running on wet concrete is deceptively dangerous. Every summer the trauma ward I work in has to deal with dozens of kids acquiring life altering tbi for doing something as mundane as running near a pool.
The ironic thing about bikers not wanting to wear helmets is that if you're not lucky, you'll end up being fit with a soft shell one at the hospital after you've bashed your head anyways. I've fit a bunch of people with orthopedic helmets for not wearing helmets over the years.
😬 yeesh, the mental image.
Yeah, pediatric care is both tremendously rewarding and horrendously soul crushing depending on what department you're working in. You eventually build up some callouses over the years, but I'd be lying if I didn't admit summers haven't lost some of its luster because of my job.
Engaging with families who went from having some of the best time of their lives to the worst moments of their existence over the course of the evening is still tough.
TBI = traumatic brain injury.
Yep. I was friends with someone both before and after they bashed their skull on concrete in a roller skating accident. They were never the same, and they weren't different for the better.
At that point, just let them self-select out of the gene pool. In a few generations, maybe our descendants won't be so adverse to basic self-preservation and common sense.
There's no genetic pressure not to take chances with incredibly unlikely events with a high chance of death. That's why we are at this point in the first place. If we want these things to stop happening, it will take using our brains and not trusting on nature to enforce it on us.
I don't get their logic either. You can clip a rock and fall of your bicycle pretty easily at speed. TBI is no joke.
oh no never ask the dutch why they are not wearing helmets, the cyclists will send every excuse your way
They just think they're all such good cyclists, and therefore never have an accident. Weird.
I had only fallen once with my bike as an adult. I live in Sweden and our cycling infrastructure in my town is g r e a t. The problem was that it was spring, so all the gravel/sand which had been spread during the winter was now on bare asphalt. I turned left and while the wheel turned, the bike did not.
There ain't much good infrastructure can do about gravel on asphalt.
Thankfully I didn't hit my head as it would've surely been a pretty bad accident. Instead I just hit every single boney part on my left side.
safe cycling infrastructure does nothing to prevent you from having a sudden equipment failure and finding yourself going over the bars face-first, or from just being an uncoordinated idiot who wipes out for no reason and gets a closed head injury. I had a crank fail on my bike once, snapped in half in full sprint and I wiped badly. helmet did its job and I was thankful to have it, because there's no predicting stuff like that
Yup. I have two family members who were in serious cycling accidents. One was from a stone that he didn't see. He didn't have a helmet on and almost didn't make it.
The second was city incompetence, which resulted in a crash on a bike path. They were wearing a helmet and probably only survived because of it.
I was on a group ride a few weeks back, and one guy's bike slipped from under him (wet metal bridge) and his head slammed into metal. His helmet destroyed, but he carried on like nothing happened.
It's the "don't tell me what to do" mindset
One of my coworkers is a story of a single bike accident. He was riding uphill on a road when his front fork broke. He went over the handle bars and head/face first into the ground. He had his helmet on, and was still knocked out. He was found in the drainage ditch on the side of the road after he was reported missing.
He has no long term damage today, but that certainly wouldn't be the case if he wasn't wearing a helmet
WTH how long was he out if they got to the point of reporting him missing?
You don't have to wait a certain amount of time to report someone missing. If your partner says "On my way home" then is 2 hours late and not responding to calls feel free to report them as missing. They could've easily been in a major accident.
yeah, that still means the guy was out for 2 hours tho
Where did that idea even come from?
The longer you take to report someone missing, the harder it is to find them.
I assume from crime dramas to heighten the tension
I've met one; but that case was really stupid: they tried to put on their helmet while cycling and fell. Technically, that accident could have been prevented if they didn't wear a helmet. It could also have been prevented if they put it on before they started cycling though.
"Don't you know, our hierarchy of safety controls is so good, we don't even bother with PPE at our site" said no intelligent engineer ever.
Resistance to PPE (helmets) baffling. It's such low effort to wear. I feel naked without it because I'm just used to it (Australia, helmets by law, but also by common sense to me...)
it's crazy how my brother doesn't wear a helmet. Even my adrenaline junkie dad always wore a helmet (he did have some accidents when he was younger so that probably helped)
I always wear a helmet, except in bed.
different kind of helmet
in the us* (for some reason?)
helmets are pretty standard where i live, you will very rarely not see people using it.
Do you have laws that require them to be worn? Australia, for example, has mandatory helmet laws.
yup. ended up becoming something people wear for style even. somehow its simultaneously the lamest and coolest thing.
Stupidity.
There isn’t much to get. These people are stupid and can’t make logical decisions.
Not everyone is cut out to live past 40.
This is just completely wrong. Netherlands overall has half the per-capita TBI deaths as compared to the US. Now, is a higher portion of their TBI deaths bike-realated -- I mean sure, because lots and lots of cycling is done there -- and not as much car-driving. But your chances of getting your head smashed is lower overall compared to the US, even with our stupid obsession with helmets.
Nope.
"While national infrastructure ministry figures report 14,000 seriously wounded cyclists in 2019, the most recently recorded year, VeiligheidNL estimates that there were actually some 80,000 injuries of which 50,000 were serious. The organisation reportedly came to its estimate on the basis of 14 accident and emergency wards’ figures." (SOURCE)
And...
"A new report from the Dutch road safety research foundation predicts that if cyclists in the Netherlands always wore a helmet, there would be 85 fewer road deaths a year." (SOURCE)
So yeah, while their per capita rates may be lower than some other countries (or higher when you factor in the extra 80,000 injuries they failed to include in their figures...), the fact remains that cycling infrastructure alone doesn't prevent accidents, and helmets are one way to downgrade the severity of an injury, or avoid injury altogether.