would feel very insecure without a helmet.
I’ve tried to think of a sensible reason not to wear one but other than it may give someone a headache or overheat their head or can’t afford one I’m at a loss. Perhaps it’s a macho thing with some people.
Certainly not in any way a macho thing, quite the opposite. It's a matter of getting one's priorities right.
There are two forms of safety. The second and very inferior one is Secondary Safety, alleviating the effects of accidents, and wearing a helmet is a part of that.
The first and far superior one is Primary Safety, avoiding having the accident in the first instance.
The obsession with secondary safety is thoroughly bad since it detracts from concentrating on the primary, an important part of which is the constant awareness of just how terribly vulnerable we all are. Having that vulnerability in mind at all times when riding has a very marked effect on our riding conduct, fear being a strong driver.
In stark contrast research has shown very clearly that using a secondary safety item like a helmet gives the rider a sense of false security far in excess of what the helmet can really achieve. Far worse is that other research has clearly shown that drivers take less care with cyclists wearing helmets than they do with those appearing more vulnerable, thus increasing the danger to helmet wearers.
To drive this point home, one GLC survey of helmet wearing in London, the main cycling centre in the UK, has given the incidence of helmet wearing as 27%. Yet every one of the 14 cyclists killed that year had been wearing a helmet. Think about that, not one of the near three quarters non-wearers had been killed. I suggest to you that in most cases it was awareness of how vulnerable they were, combined with no false sense of security from wearing a helmet that kept them safe.
So how do we best implement Primary Safety? For that we have to look back at our cycling history. We in Britain invented the safety bicycle some 140 years ago. Up until then riding the "penny farthings" at their typical 10 mph or less brought a high risk of tipping forward for an "over the bars" accident, especialy when braking the front wheel, but the safety bicycle ridden at typically the same sort of speed almost entirely removed that risk, hence the name safety bicycle.
For the next 100 years we all tended to ride at quite sedate speeds at around 10 mph, mostly utility riding with some countryside leisure as well. Only a tiny number of cyclists were in any way sporting, riding at higher speeds This was very evident to me in the trade 70 years ago, cycling accidents being infrequent, and the rare death due to being run over and crushed by a motor vehicle.
For reasons I've covered elsewhere cycling by adults all but disappeared in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s, but early in the 1980s the mountain bike arrived and sparked a leisure riding revival which was sporting in nature. That in turn lead to a revival of road cycling and many will remember how we started to get interested in such as the Tour de France from the 1990s on.
The outcome of these changes in Britain has meant that as utility cycling such as commuting has returned, it's had a very sporting slant with the riding quite commonly being at 20 mph or more, often head down on drop bars, helmeted and determinedly grim faced.
So as surely as 2 follows 1, the accident and death rates have ridden sharply.
At high speeds the chance of stopping for anything suddenly getting into our path is very small and the risk of going over the bars and getting a serious head injury high. But at moderate speeds up to about 12 mph we are more likely to be able to stop or slow and the risk of going over the bars is minimal.
So if you want to maximise your cycling safety, return to the fundamental point of the safety bicycle, the ability to travel three or four times as far as walking in a given time with no more effort. At speeds always below 15 mph you'll have much more time to pay attention to motor vehicles and avoid some of driver's dangerous behaviour. You won't need to compete with them at being first into the blind bend. You'll be able to stop in time for the idiot who turns left across your nose into a side road. In less of a hurry you won't be so inclined to ride up the nearside of a truck into the driver's blind spot and get crushed as they turn left. Like the more sensible slower riding Dutch cyclists you won't fret at the 15.5 mph assist cutoff since you won't encounter it.
And you'll probably live a long and more pain free life.
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