A powerful message on bike helmets and @Preventable injuries in Mount Pleasant
As a vast majority of my readers may know, I live in Mount Pleasant. I’m a big fan of The Nice Café, a little neighbourhood joint where the breakfast is totally “no frills”. Last week, JT and I went for a walk around the Mount Pleasant area, and we bumped into the sign shown on my photo below, at 8th Avenue and Quebec. I’ve eaten at TNC so many times, and I had not seen this up until this past week. Somebody must have had an accident relatively recently. So sad. This speaks to the campaign on whose social media strategy I was involved from 2009 to 2011, The Community Against Preventable Injuries (@Preventable). I think the message is pretty poignant and extremely powerful. People, I know that there’s a whole lot of folks who would rather we don’t have helmet laws. But I think cyclists should wear one.
Yes, but WHY do you think people should wear bike helmets? The best evidence I have seen is that the net benefit of helmets is marginal or nonexistent. If you read the literature, the proportion of fatal accidents reduced by helmet use is somewhere between 0 and 10%. (by comparison, the debate around car seat belt use has centered around the figures of 40-60%).
Zero. Really. It’s not enough to have strong feelings: feelings won’t save you. So on what evidence do you recommend helmets?
I have seen plenty of evidence in the literature, Ryan, but I’m going to let the folks from the scientific side of Preventable take this one and answer your question.
Also, let me ask you why do you wear a helmet when you bike?
(tl;dr: bike helmets are the weird residue of sumptuary laws, and I’m not a rebel)
I have several reasons, almost all of them substantially social.
1) bike helmets prevent expensive and annoying tickets. This matters a lot to me, and the literature is fairly clear about this benefit in BC.
2) bicycle helmets are mandatory in the kind of bike racing I do, and are mandated by my club (when I’m racing in their races or wearing the club uniform). These are well-meaning (not to mention insurance-forced) rules, and in fairness, bike racing may actually be a high-risk activity that justifies extraordinary precautions: in some forms of off-road riding, I probably average more than one crash per hour of riding, depending on how you define “crash.”
3) My friends and family, who have not read the literature, and are mostly not from the Netherlands, get all weird and cross-eyed when I mention the dubious effectiveness of helmets. Since I already have reasons 1 & 2 driving me to wear a helmet almost all the time, I get to avoid awkward, repetitive conversations. It saves me having to change the subject to politics, or drinking while pregnant, or something else less annoying.
4) Since I’ve got the weight of other reasons driving me towards owning a helmet anyways, it is a convenient mounting point for bike lights, so if I habitually wear my helmet, I don’t forget my bike lights, and I don’t have to pull them off the bike every time I lock it up.
I eagerly await the Preventable input.
Hi Ryan and Raul,
I’m not a scientist, but I do quote them a lot as the blogger for Preventable.ca. I actually came across this message a short while ago and have been doing some research on the background story for an upcoming blog. Bike helmets are a popular subject on the Preventable blog.
I’ve written on the subject in a recent blog entry – http://www.preventable.ca/2011/04/bike-helmets-%E2%80%93-not-the-solution-or-the-problem/ . To sum the post up, bike helmets are a very good way to help prevent bike injuries, but not the only way. Education for both drivers and cyclists on how to share the road is another.
Opponents of bike helmets often say that bike helmets provide a false sense of security. I’ve yet to find any compelling research that proves this. What I do find compelling are these number from the Canadian Institute for Health Information, “Helmet use reduces the risk of serious head injury by 60% to 88%.”
However you feel about bike helmets, it’s discussions like this that can help challenge and possibly change peoples attitudes towards wearing bike helmets.
Thanks for the post Raul and thanks for adding your perspective Ryan!