To Encourage Biking, Cities Lose the Helmets • Hacker News Board

Re: To Encourage Biking, Cities Lose the Helmets

#171

Post by barrkel » Mon, Oct 01, 2012, 10:32 AM UTC

jadyoyster wrote: post #153

barrkel wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Helmets (including motorbike helmets) are designed to protect you from a vertical fall of about 2 meters and hitting your head at that speed. If you have a collision at 50km/h, chances are you'll be hitting the ground from a height similar to that. I don't know how many such collisions you've been in, but I've been in about 6 motorbike accidents of fairly light severity, including hitting a car at about 50km/h. I bou…

Motorbike helmets are in no way comparable to bicycle helmets. Bicycle helmets have to be very light due to the physical activity exerted by their wearers. Another thing you'll rarely hear bicycle advocates say is that cycling on the pavement is safer. It most definitely is not, due to the speed difference between pedestrians and cyclists. This is not only dangerous to pedestrians: drivers aren't used to checking for…

I qualified my support for riding on the pavement with speed differentials. There's little doubt in my mind that the lower overall risk in many junctions comes from riders+pedestrians than riders+vehicles, especially turning trucks.

And motorbike helmets are actually very similar to cycle helmets under the shell. Biggest differences are abrasion resistance from the shell and more coverage on average, but 1/2 helmets - brain buckets - are very very similar. Indeed I see a certain percentage of London cyclists wearing helmets that would be legal on motorbikes in US states with mandatory laws.

Re: To Encourage Biking, Cities Lose the Helmets

#172

Post by rmc » Mon, Oct 01, 2012, 10:53 AM UTC

rickmb wrote: post #64

mikeryan wrote: post #8

This article is great but it does itself a pretty big disservice by pretty much ignoring a lot of why many of the European cities which have successful programs are successful. Namely they have made significant investment into infrastructure to make bicycling safer, many times prioritizing bike traffic over auto traffic. I ride quite a bit, live in Berkeley which has numerous "Bicycle Boulevards [1]" and I'm pretty c…

Why do people insist on pretending all of Europe is full of bike lanes? In most inner cities there often isn't room for bike lanes, or the lane is just a line on the asphalt. I bike to work every day in Amsterdam, not a single bike lane on my route, I have to share the road with cars, trams, buses, trucks and scooters. The only traffic that actually poses a regular challenge because of their erratic movements and ten…

Here here. I'm from Dublin, which this article points out as an example of a successful bike hire city (which is accurate, it's massively successful). However the idea that Dublin has fantastic cycle infrastructure and lots of bike lanes (esp. in the area covered by Dublin Bikes) is crazy talk.

Re: To Encourage Biking, Cities Lose the Helmets

#173

Post by rmc » Mon, Oct 01, 2012, 10:56 AM UTC

cbr wrote: post #87

baddox wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the "anti-helmet" studies and arguments I've seen aren't particularly anti-helmet in principle, but rather just make the case that the benefits of wearing a helmet apply equally to pedestrians and automobile drivers/passengers. The argument isn't that helmets can prevent head injuries while riding a bike. The argument is that if there are laws or social stigma around bicycle helmets, then they should apply eq…

> the benefits of wearing a helmet apply equally to pedestrians and automobile drivers/passengers Cycling is about six times more likely to kill you, per hour, than driving. So while helmets in cars would help some, the case for them on bikes is stronger.

But do people spend as much time driving as cycling?

Re: To Encourage Biking, Cities Lose the Helmets

#174

Post by rmc » Mon, Oct 01, 2012, 10:58 AM UTC

papalalu wrote: post #25

jmspring wrote: post #7

Until there is a distinct change in driver attitudes, riding without a helmet in most of the US is just nuts. Sure, there are places like Portland with dedicated bike lanes and an overall emphasis on pro-bike culture, but it is a rare spot. In the bay area, there is a very large biking community -- road, mountain, around town, etc. The problem is, the infrastructure isn't there for bikes compared to Amsterdam. We hav…

the fact is that a helmet is not enough to guarantee your safety - if cycling without one is "nuts", cycling with one is too.

Nothing guarantees safety. Everything has a risk. It's impossible to not die. So there's always a non-zero "chance of death/injury" number.

Re: To Encourage Biking, Cities Lose the Helmets

#175

Post by rmc » Mon, Oct 01, 2012, 11:00 AM UTC

ams6110 wrote: post #18

As a kid in the 1970s, I rode my bike everywhere, never wore a helmet (nobody did), and here I am today. Of course helmets can help avoid head injury, not riding bikes probably helps even more. I mean where do you draw the line on the fear vs. the actual chance of something happening. On the subject of community shared bicycles, our town tried that about 10 years ago, all the bicycles were stolen within the first mon…

Conservatives often like to point out how "things were OK back in $DECADE" without these silly modern health and safety rules.

However that's not true. Less people are dying due to health and safety rules. E.g. The London 2012 olypmic stadium was the first olypmpic stadium that had no fatalities during construction.

Re: To Encourage Biking, Cities Lose the Helmets

#176

Post by arethuza » Mon, Oct 01, 2012, 11:43 AM UTC

nl wrote: post #168

lloeki wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When one ton of metal hits you naked at 50kph (the legal speed limit in traffic areas of cities here in France) the acceleration alone can tear or damage your aorta with impressive odds (IIRC about 50% chance). A helmet is an extremely marginal protection. On a pure energy analysis, I'd rather have cyclists navigate with pedestrians than with cars. The latter result in a basically non-elastic collision transmitting m…

Energy Analysis is pointless in this situation. Mixing cyclists and pedestrians is extremely dangerous in locations where pedestrians aren't used to cyclists, because pedestrians have a tendency to change directions very quickly.

Having a bell on your cycle helps a lot with this - just give it a ring a few times before overtaking people on a combined cycle/foot path and they will generally (although not always) try and do the sensible thing.

In my own experience I was somewhat surprised to find that using a bell actually works a lot better than saying "Excuse me please".

Also, some pedestrians will do intentionally stupid things when encountering a cyclist on a cycle path, but fortunately them seem pretty rare and far less common than cyclists who do stupid things.

Re: To Encourage Biking, Cities Lose the Helmets

#177

Post by davidjohnstone » Mon, Oct 01, 2012, 11:48 AM UTC

nl wrote: post #170

davidjohnstone wrote: post #103

As a keen cyclist (I'm building http://www.cyclinganalytics.com/ ), I wish we didn't have mandatory helmet laws, but there are a lot of points on both sides of the argument worth pondering. * Making helmets mandatory makes cycling look dangerous. What other things do you wear a helmet while doing? Between this, ruining peoples' hair, not looking as chic, and the inconvenience of it, helmets discourage people from cyc…

http://www.cyclinganalytics.com/ looks interesting. FYI .tcx files exported from Garmin Connect seem to fail (.fit files are ok).

Thanks. I just fixed the TCX parsing issue.

Re: To Encourage Biking, Cities Lose the Helmets

#178

Post by lloeki » Mon, Oct 01, 2012, 12:08 PM UTC

nl wrote: post #168

lloeki wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When one ton of metal hits you naked at 50kph (the legal speed limit in traffic areas of cities here in France) the acceleration alone can tear or damage your aorta with impressive odds (IIRC about 50% chance). A helmet is an extremely marginal protection. On a pure energy analysis, I'd rather have cyclists navigate with pedestrians than with cars. The latter result in a basically non-elastic collision transmitting m…

Energy Analysis is pointless in this situation. Mixing cyclists and pedestrians is extremely dangerous in locations where pedestrians aren't used to cyclists, because pedestrians have a tendency to change directions very quickly.

> extremely dangerous

In which way? Unless the cyclist is moving like a madman in a crowd, the worse that usually happens is a bruise (and in rare cases, a broken bone).

When I'm riding, cars pass centimeters away from me, and that's not because they're careless but because in some areas there's simply no other choice, except riding on the sidewalk.

> aren't used to cyclists

Unless you organize like here[0], people need to cooperate with cyclists, whether in a car or on foot.

As arrethuza mentions, a bell on your bicycle helps a lot (and cars simply don't hear that bell). It's not aggressive in any way (entirely unlike a horn on a car), and people just move out of the way of cyclists without much thinking about it.

[0] https://maps.google.com/maps?q=strasbourg&hl=fr&ll=4...

Re: To Encourage Biking, Cities Lose the Helmets

#179

Post by aurelianito » Mon, Oct 01, 2012, 12:33 PM UTC

koide wrote: post #162

mahyarm wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's definitely a culture! In america although, the concept of race still persists everywhere, including government forums which split people's choices into appearance strains and not ethnicities or cultures.

America has no single government and is a huge mixture of cultures, from Canadians to Argentinians. I hate the fact that the USA has no proper demonym in English.

> America has no single government and is a huge mixture of cultures, from Canadians to Argentinians. I hate the fact that the USA has no proper demonym in English.

Hi, I am an Argentinian. While in Spanish the word "americano" means that you were born somewhere in The Americas, in the English language the word "american" means that you were born in the USA (AKA: America).

It happens a lot that words which are quite similar mean different things in different languages. Let's just embrace and understand these differences.

Cheers!

Re: To Encourage Biking, Cities Lose the Helmets

#180

Post by koide » Mon, Oct 01, 2012, 12:55 PM UTC

aurelianito wrote: post #179

koide wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America has no single government and is a huge mixture of cultures, from Canadians to Argentinians. I hate the fact that the USA has no proper demonym in English.

> America has no single government and is a huge mixture of cultures, from Canadians to Argentinians. I hate the fact that the USA has no proper demonym in English. Hi, I am an Argentinian. While in Spanish the word "americano" means that you were born somewhere in The Americas, in the English language the word "american" means that you were born in the USA (AKA: America). It happens a lot that words which are quite…

In the English language the word American has more than one meaning. The most prevalent is of course the gentilic, but one of the other meanings is indeed "being native or inhabitant of the American continent."

The big problem with this word is that, being USA as influential in the western culture as it is, it helps corrupting the corresponding word in the languages that do have a proper gentilic like French and Spanish. Also, it promotes ignorance among the ignorants (I've met US people thinking America is just and only the country) without a tangible benefit.

See http://users.dcc.uchile.cl/~rbaeza/inf/american.html for a similar view.