Remember kids... always wear a helmet. (The almighty bikeradar helmet thread)

I've been resisting the urge to mention the number of bike-related head injury cases floating around out there. Did some of my clinical placements and voluntary work with a few people, and most recently my friend and neighbour (an ex recumbent world champion) came off and is still in hospital nearly 12 months later. There were other precipitating factors involved, but the upshot is he's going to have to be rehomed, his communication is severely impaired, and he's a bit fucked really.

I think the real damage is done when your frontal lobe takes a whack (my mate needed to have the frontal bone of his skull removed in a hurry due to the brain swelling). The resulting loss of executive function has a massive knock-on effect for the functions centred in other areas of the brain. It's for this reason that I think people who wear their helmets tilted back and exposing their foreheads are misguided enough to need a bit of road-side education.

Anyway, I'm not going to be a helmet fascist, as there are also a lot of pedestrians with brain injury due to traffic-related accidents, and it all seems to get a bit ridiculous. Ultimately we need road users to act more responsibly, and with a level of care appropriate to the size/speed of their vehicle.

Could I just say that if you express it in those terms more often, people will listen?

And to ask you to do so more.

Good on you for making the point so well.

Stoke Mandeville is full of motorcyclists with head and spine injuries, let's not make it full of cyclists.