It's funny how the baseball cap/hair/shower cap/bald skin etc. wearing crowd never write about their happiness at having avoided serious head, facial and dental injuries because they weren't wearing a helmet... possibly because they're regretful, too paralysed to type, in a coma, or dead.
I have done many times in this forum, saying how I've ridden bicycles for well over 70 years, never wearing a helmet and never banging my head doing it.
There are some things helmet wearing promoters should be aware of:
Bicycles have been around since the first one in 1817, yet a cycle helmet wasn't invented until 1980. Obviously they weren't very necessary for 163 years and even now after 206 years hardly any in the cycling intensive countries think they are.
How can that be? The answer is very simple, riding sensibly.
In the most cycling intensive country of all, The Netherlands, they ride without helmets,
slowly.
In the world's most population dense countries, India, China and Japan, cycling without helmets is the norm,
slowly.
Throughout the rest of the third world where cycling without helmets is the norm, it's also done
slowly.
But in Britain we've stupidly made helmets necessary by riding at inappropriate cycling speeds. We didn't use to, for most of two centuries we commonly rode at up to to about 10mph and a rare 12 mph was getting a move on, so we didn't hurt ourselves or anyone else.
But by the 1960s with increasing affluence we adults increasingly gave up cycling for driving, leaving cycling only to kids on chopper bikes and the like. When we adults finally returned to cycling during the 1980s on, it was as a leisure pursuit, sporting in nature like mountain biking and club style road biking. Thus the silly speeds of 20mph or more became common with riders often wearing Lycra and Helmets like Tour de France wannabees and too often looking faintly ridiculous.
Inevitably that resulted in large numbers unable to stop or slow quickly, riders going over the bars getting serious head injuries and even broken limbs. Madness.
Helmets are not the answer, the majority of cyclists killed in London each year have been shown to be wearing helmets, showing how ineffective they are.
The answer is to get back to cycling as it always used to be done here and still is in most of the world, sensibly at up to 10mph from which speed slowing or stopping almost completely avoids such accidents. By all means wear a helmet as well if wished, since like the OP, it can protect you even before you get onto your bike. But don't try to tell others that helmet wearing is the way to cycling safety because it isn't. Cycling at sensible speeds is the most certain way.
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