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

What bit was wrong?

The wrong bit.

Helpful oliver.
"Helpful Oliver.": he's quite schtrict about that sort of thing.

You said Everywhere which I took as meaning on every single road, everywhere. If you are now talking about main roads then yes that is possible and places like the New Forest don't have many main roads. Saying that, I still don't see a time where the narrow forest roads would have cycle lanes added and they sure are not going to let you widen the roads into the Forest. Not saying that is right or good but just the way it is. Exactly why I don't believe cycle lanes are the answer for most of the country.

And as for going outside of the New Forest, no I would never leave the forest. The other villagers tell me people don't come back.

Maybe we need to start a cycle infrastructure thread...

Where is your logic to say it'll do some good? Once you break the surface of a balloon it fails pretty badly and doesn't do any good at holding air, once you hit glass hard enough to break it, it's probably more dangerous with all the sharp shards flying about. I'm not saying this is how a helmet behaves but you could apply those mechanics to a helmet and say that past a certain point it would logically do you more harm. Unless you know the actual material properties and how they react, it's probably not worth trying to draw logical conclusions without proper testing.

Has this been resolved yet?

^ They're all jostling for the secret prize for the first post that takes the thread to a hundred pages

Well played Sir, well played!

What bit was wrong?

You should not be relying on a helmet to aid you in a collision, rather than preventing a collision from happening in the first place.

My tuppance, feel free to wheel out the stats or call me a cunt

Cunt.

#Yolo

would a bern helmet with the silly cap inside protect me more than a £30000 kask dry-martini helmet?

Has this been resolivered yet?

Fixed.

Is it not possible to do x y and z to prevent a collision, AND wear a helmet that will prevent some injuries in some accidents? i thought that it was.

It's possible once you realised that in order to ride with less risk, you have to alter the way you ride, rather than the sheer number of equipment you're wearing.

Your logic appears to be akin to 'why do rock climbers use ropes, surely they should just hold on to the cliff face tightly and not let go?'

No, my logic does not seemed to be akin to the rockclimbers using ropes, are you out of your warped mind?

Actually what kind of head injuries helmets prevent and to what extent?
Do they take speed of impact, shape of object hit etc. into account for the research purposes? Importantly: do they research only cases where head injuries where sustained while wearing/not wearing a helmet and severity of this injuries, or make bad statistics based on the wrong assumptions (i.e. broken collar bone, no head injuries - helmet saved the head, without noting whether the head took any impact at all and so on).

I know that I should read the papers myself, but surely there is someone who read it all before me and is able to explain it in few simple sentences. How it's done, what exactly it says, has it any scientific value to it?

One thing I had noticed a while ago. When i bang my head on the wall it hurts and there is an element of concussion. With helmeted head it hurts less but the concussion is still there. You can possibly even feel the difference just slapping your head with/without the helmet.
They obviously spread the impact over bigger surface making skull fractures less likely but I'm not that sure about concussion thing. I heard somewhere that the polystyrene lining in cycling helmets is too hard.

It was TSG Evolution helmet btw.
I stopped wearing it after it became uncomfortable (gone way too lose after couple of months) and provided more distraction then what it was worth.

One more thing. Does your hearing get affected by helmet or is it just me?

It's just you...

I crashed on a slippery corner (low-sided) and came away with just scrapes but the speed at which I went down sideways (riding at a low speed) made me think I was lucky not to have my head meet road. Side and rear impacts on the head can lead to terrible injuries that I could do without. I suspect a helmet would help with the that kind of crash. Instinct means to stick an arm out usually, slowing the impact to the point that block of foam on your head might be useful.

I still don't bother when nipping 'round town though.

Cunt.

#Yolo

Do buddhists ever YOLO?

Can you not see that safety equipment can be used in conjunction with riding as safely as possible?

Not entirely, adding a helmet on top of cycle training does not make it less riskier to ride a bicycle.

It's boiled down to personal preference in the end.

I crashed on a slippery corner (low-sided) and came away with just scrapes but the speed at which I went down sideways (riding at a low speed) made me think I was lucky not to have my head meet road.

There was a study about the larger circumference of the helmet mean your head is more likely to come in contact with the tarmac, gotta google it as I'm not sure how to find it.

Can you not see that safety equipment can be used in conjunction with riding as safely as possible?

If wearing a helmet made it impossible to ride safely then I would tell everyone 'don't wear a helmet under any circumstances'. But it doesn't work like that, one can wear a helmet and ride safely.

One problem is that people tend to unconsciously normalise their behaviour to achieve an acceptable level of risk. This unfortunately negates any benefit of safety equipment. In other words, if you wear a helmet you ride more dangerously even if you have no intention of doing so. This of course increases the probability of other injuries that a helmet does nothing to protect against.

The problem with the rock-climbing analogy is that in climbing you are dealing with an inherently risky, natural environment. Rocks get wet or dusty and they can break, making falls likely or untimately inevitable. For simply riding a bike on the road at commuting speed the risk of a fall is hugely lower. The real risk is from motor vehicles, which many people insist on seeing these as a similarly inherent, natural risk. Of course they're nothing of the kind, they're only there because we allow them to be and every one is controlled by a person. The insistence on safety gear is therefore misplaced since we can (and should) deal with the source of the risk (i.e., motor vehicles and crappy driving) rather than trying to reduce its impact through safety gear.

...could say the same thing about brakes!

#brakesaredeath

They look around more and are generally likely to be more alert than people who often lazily use their hearing to compensate for lack of skill etc.

So how is that any different to what I suggested? IF you chose to wear headphones please look around more.

Pretty much everything is inherantly risky and I would argue that cycling is one of them... you are always some diesel, or a stupid ped or a stuck cleat away from hitting the deck in a way that is much harder to break your fall than as a ped.

Yes, when I see those videos of people in their suits or skirts pootling to work on the segregated cycle lanes of Amsterdam and Copenhagen I can't help but think that they're a mere hair's breadth from a nasty tumble!

Yes, there are much more important things than helmets. Yes, they will do little or nothing in many serious accidents. But do either of these things make wearing a helmet irrational, harmful etc etc?
Not wearing a helmet, no. But they do make encouraging people to wear helmets irrational, because every bit of encouragement, urging, pleading, emotional blackmailing and outright legal compulsion (and I put these all into the same category) spreads the general feeling of "well, if all cyclists wore helmets there wouldn't be a problem". Now we all know this is bollocks, the risks will be very similar (and possibly worse), but we don't get to make the decisions. Scantly-informed and vote-hungry politicians under pressure from the even less informed public and the knee-(and tear-) jerking press get to make the rules.

Helmet encouragement/campaigning/compulsion is, at best, a distraction from and, at worst, actively leads us away from the meaningful investment in infrastructure and the legal and cultural changes needed to make mass cycling a reality in the UK.

Edit: I'd like make clear that I wear a helmet and I would never criticise someone else for doing so. I also think there may be a reasonable case for making very young kids wear helmets up until an age that their risk of falling simply from cycling along is reduced.

I'm not anti helmet, please modify your language.

^ This, I'm anti-compulsory, big difference.

Surely wearing a helmet is encouragement - I am still waiting for a few of the anti-helmet brigade on here to clearly and unequivocally state that the helmeted are a symptom and in no way part of the problem. But I am not sure that they can do that honestly because everything you do has consequences, and wearing a helmet has the consequence of normalising it, and normalisation is encouragement.

It's entirely possible that they are a symptom and part of the problem, there is obviously a vicious circle here. But people wear helmets for different reasons: maybe they're cycling to a race, maybe their commute ends in an off-road section, maybe it's just habit from a time when they did some mountain biking (like me), maybe it keeps their head warm or gives them somewhere to mount an extra light. It's worth noting, however, that all of these reasons are about the wearer, none of them are about encouraging other people to wear a helmet (or recommending/urging etc.) So, unless you make assumptions about the wearer, using a helmet doesn't normalise or encourage the use of a helmet for standard, unhurried, A-to-B cycling.

Do buddhists ever YOLO?

I already did that gag in the memes thread, feel free to steal and reuse.