As a respite from politics and economics, I want to raise a matter of great importance to many cyclists.
In cycling magazines, online discussion groups and outside cafes where cyclists gather on Saturday mornings there are frequent fights over whether helmets should be compulsory for cyclists. Australia and New Zealand are the only countries where helmets are required.
The arguments pro boil down to these:
You are stupid if you don’t.
If you suffer brain damage the rest of us have to pay your medical bills.
What about the children?
The arguments con are:
It’s my head and none of your business.
Wearing a helmet encourages riders to take greater risks so results in more accidents.
The requirement discourages many people from riding and so contributes to obesity, heart attacks and strokes. (It is true that for many women “helmet hair” is an even more serious condition than split ends)
One year, the first helmet war of the year on the usenet group aus.bicycle started at 12:10 AM on 1 January.
Occasionally someone tries to inject a bit of science into the argument.
Chris Rissel of The School of Public Health at Sydney University got the quite clever idea of looking at figures for cyclists presenting at hospitals, taking arm and hand injuries as a proxy for the number of accidents involving cyclists and plotting head injuries in relation to those. If the relationship remained the same, you could infer that helmets had not reduced head injuries. He found (to his disappointment, I suspect) that head injuries had declined in relation to arm injuries. Now I think Rissel would admit that this was advocacy research. He is well known in cycling circles and has for some time argued against the helmet law.
Rissel notes that the decline began before the helmet law so he concludes that there must have been other factors causing it. “from a practical and policy perspective, the introduction of mandatory helmet legislation does not appear to be temporally associated with a substantial drop in head injuries among cyclists.”
Rissel suggests a trial, suspending the helmet law in an area for a year or so. But he concedes “Helmet use is likely to prevent some head injury, particularly for younger age groups, and may also reduce severity of injury.” I think he might have some trouble getting the test past the university ethics committee. Ethics committees usually do not like sacrificing some subjects in the interest of knowledge.
I don’t have a dog in this fight. I am a cyclist and I do wear a helmet but my libertarian instincts do not put this issue atop my list of issues to fight over. But I do get fun from watching.
The report can be found here and a sample of the tone of debate here.
