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Amsterdam prepares to ‘ban the fatbikes’ amid rise in serious accidents [The Netherlands] (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by HowRu68@lemmy.world to c/europe@feddit.org
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The safety organisation VeiligheidNL estimates that 5,000 fatbike riders are treated in A&E [ i.e Accident & Emergency] departments each year, on the basis of a recent sample of hospitals. “And we also see that especially these young people aged from 12 to 15 have the most accidents,” said the spokesperson Tom de Beus.

Now Amsterdam’s head of transport, Melanie van der Horst, has said “unorthodox measures” are needed and has announced that she will ban these heavy electric bikes from city parks, starting in the Vondelpark. Like the city of Enschede, which is also drawing up a city centre ban, she is acting on a stream of requests “begging me to ban the fatbikes”.

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[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com -2 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) (1 children)

"Helmet shapes that transform linear shocks into rotational shocks are more dangerous" was literally just one thing I threw in as maybe, part, of the cause of those numbers I had read about in Denmark, which was a single line in a much broader discussion.

(I never actually said that it totally offsets other effects, by the way, I just thought it was a contributing factor for the counter-intuitive results I had read in that study)

You just then grabbed that one "maybe this part of it" line of mine and ran with it as if I was claiming that wearing a helmet doesn't reduce the risk of head injuries, something I did not and even though I actually wrote three times (including in the post immediately after your first reply) that wearing a helmet does reduce the risk of head injuries.

As for the rest, as I basically said in the last paragraph of the last post, yeah, based on the recent study you linked that shows there is no clear evidence for a risk compensation effect, so as per all evidence wearing helmet when cycling is safer than not because the helmet does protect the head and if there is no risk compensation effect then there is no indirect increase in risk (due to riskier behaviors) from wearing a helmet. What I remember from what I read as per my original post was a tiny effect (something like 2%) so maybe that was within the error margin. I mean, I'm pretty sure I read about it over a decade ago and you linked to a study which is more recent than that.

[–] CyberEgg@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

You just then grabbed that one "maybe this part of it" line of mine and ran with it as if I was claiming that wearing a helmet doesn't reduce the risk of head injuries, something I did not and even though I actually wrote three times that wearing a helmet does reduce the risk of head injuries.

You kept repeating that part so much and made it look so important I thought you were pointing to that as a caveat.

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Then I guess we were feeding each other's misunderstanding.

Those numbers from Denmark stuck in my mind for all these years exactly because I though they were counter-intuitive, and I thought they were counter-intuitive exactly because "helmets reduce the risk of head injury" is pretty much indisputable.

[–] CyberEgg@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Well, good thing we could clear that misunderstanding then.

Those numbers from Denmark stuck in my mind for all these years exactly because I though they were counter-intuitive, and I thought they were counter-intuitive exactly because "helmets reduce the risk of head injury" is pretty much indisputable.

To finally actually say something about this: I guess it's possible that on impacts at certain angles, a helmet's shape can have some influence on injuries. But those seems to be such rare circumstances that I doubt it does have a visible expressions on statistics.

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 8 hours ago

Well, it probably requires quite a lot of speed for the more elongated shape of a bicycle helmet to has enough impact on making the head rotate to actually cause damage and from what I read bicycle helmets are designed for collisions up to 15 km/h.

This would also explain why motorcycle helmets tend more towards a spherical shape as the average speed of a collision on a motorcycle is much higher.