To Encourage Biking, Cities Lose the Helmets

> I am generally a pedestrian, and in my experience when I am running on a paved path and cyclists go around me, they sometimes say "on your left" which works pretty well, but bells are great.

As a cyclist, I don't feel like it works very well. About 50% of the time the pedestrian startles and dodges when they hear you say it. In about 50% of those cases, the direction they dodge is to the left. And this is on the bike path where pedestrians are presumably accustomed to and expecting bicycle traffic.

I still do it for the sake of courtesy (and the hope that it will eventually become a common and well-understood practice), but I don't rely on it and give pedestrians as wide a berth as possible as well.

>simply not trained . . .

Which is something I've never understood, personally.

Granted I'm a bit more concerned with another car flying through and ripping my door off; but you bet I'm worried about traffic when I open my door.

No matter how you assess the situation, there is no excuse for such carelessness.

Why would anyone risk human lives [possibly your own] and personal property in such a fashion? ---

Based on your time in Amsterdam, would you say drivers there are more _patient_ with cyclists?

I've often held the sentiment that a large number of US accidents are simply a result of impatience. The way people handle switching lanes, controlled intersections, merging, etc. in the US has always seemed rather "selfish" to me.

As an example: it always seems that drivers here in the states, when switching lanes, would rather overtake than undertake, even when undertaking is clearly the safer option (e.g: less traffic behind the car in question, little or no traffic behind you but considerable traffic in front of you).

Same for San Francisco, NYC and pretty much every other city in the US. Only recently has SF begun to plan for the separation of parking and bike lanes. I believe a pretty significant number of bike deaths in NYC last year were attributable to dooring.

I have a strong opinion on this issue: I see mandatory helmet laws as an example of democratic discrimination. Helmet legislation is driven and either directly or tacitly supported/ignored by non-cyclist politicians and voters, with little if any polling of cyclist preferences. While mandatory helmet laws are widely disliked by cyclists, their minority position makes resistance difficult. And your average car-driving helmet-law-supporting/ignoring citizen is dismissive of the right to autonomy of cyclists. As a counterexample, there are many things that could be done to improve the safety of cars - helmets, four-point harnesses, backwards-facing seats, engine speed-limiters, alcohol-sensing engine locks, and of course (possible soon) a mandatory full switch to self-driving cars. However, any attempts to introduce such sensible measures will be shot down immediately by a ferocious counter-reaction. The basic logic is that car drivers will not accept intrusive safety measures simply because a) they do not feel or wish to be made to feel unsafe (regardless of statistics) and b) they do not wish to compromise their "feeling of driving." But car drivers are perfectly happy dictating to cyclists that they have no choice in accepting an intrusive safety measure which compromises their "feeling of riding" - anyone who has tried it knows that biking is not biking without the feeling of wind blowing through your hair. It sounds trivial but it makes a massive difference - the typical reaction of car drivers to this point is to snort and say "yeah right" - the hypocrisy is revealed if you make any suggestions about implementing the previous safety measures.

This democratic bullying seems to go hand in hand with a more nasty attitude of drivers to cyclists in general. In my town in New Zealand, if I ride without a helmet for even a short distance I can expect to be verbally abused by car-driving members of the public. In particular, young men will shout random abuse at me - that's not all that bad, the worst is older baby boomer generation men, who will actually slow down beside me and, bristling with anger, yell at me asking where my helmet is. These reactions confuse me. I do not roam around on my bike looking for drivers not wearing seatbelts and try and ride up to them and hammer their windows and yell abuse. Even if this was possible, I wouldn't have any interest in doing so. If you want to wear a seatbelt or not is up to you. You can do so with full knowledge of the risks of a police fine or injury in an accident if you wish. Similarly, why should drivers feel upset and compelled to accost me if I choose not to wear a helmet? I do so in the full knowledge of the risk of a police fine and an injury in an accident. That is my business, so why do they feel the need to confront me? And why do my personal choices seem to make them so angry?

The answer is simple. Our road culture is aggressive, impatient and me vs. them. I am sure the drivers in my town are by no means the worst in the world, but still, there is an atmosphere of confrontation that permeates driving here. People are in a hurry to get where they are going, and everyone else on the roads is an enemy. Unsurprisingly men are the worst offenders. And cyclists are the easiest targets: fragile, wobbly, slow, unable to protect themselves, uninsulated from abuse, unable to outmaneuever or escape an angry car-driver, above all out of place, they become a focal point, the easy targets, for all the aggression of an aggressive road culture. The helmet law is in my mind just a manifestation of this power-imbalance and a focus for the tension it generates. It does not surprise me that most helmet laws seem to have arisen as urbanisation and car use and speeds intensified, i.e. as the dominance of a break-neck pace car culture became cemented. Instead of trying to soften road culture and build cities which work for all different modes of transport, we have a helmet law and some glass and gravel-strewn cycleways wedged between parked cars and roaring traffic flows. How anyone would feel comfortable and happy cycling in this environment is anyone's guess, but what is for sure is that the helmet law at best accomplishes little to nothing and at worst is a dangerous red herring, distracting energy and attention from addressing much harder and more critical problems of culture and infrastructure.

I have nothing against helmets as safety devices and I think they should be worn. However I think making it a law, and making adult cyclists who wish to ride bare-headed the free subject of assault from members of the public (not to mention the police) accomplishes nothing more than aggravating a combative cyclists vs car-driver culture.

> The best available evidence shows that one factor completely overwhelms all others - the number of cyclists on the road. [...] Motorists cannot be blamed for struggling to predict the movements of a type of vehicle which they encounter rarely and do not understand.

The reason for increased safety may have less to do with better prediction and more to do with the fact that the motorized traffic speed slows to slowest cyclist speed as the number of cyclists increases. There is no way to go fast if there is a cyclist every 100ft in the same lane as the cars.