Bike helmets

As we mentioned in our last post, I was in the Netherlands recently. I enjoy visiting the Netherlands, and one of the reasons is that I get to marvel at the bicycle infrastructure there, where towns are organized on the understanding that cycling is the most popular mode of transport, with cars an afterthought.

And so in my brief time there, I saw hundreds of people cycling. Old people, young people, children, teenagers. Cycling to work, cycling home, cycling to the supermarket, cycling for fun. Cycling fast, cycling slow, cycling on tandems, cycling alone. Yet in all this diversity of cyclitude, one thing was constant:

No-one was wearing a helmet.

Dutch people cycling near the Nijmegen train station without any helmets. The nutters!

How shocking you find this will probably depend to a large part on where you're from. Of course, the Dutch find it quite normal. In Paris, helmets are not common, but maybe 10% of cyclists wear them (myself included). At the opposite extreme, there are places like Sydney, and a number of American cities, it is illegal not to wear a helmet.

Surely, then, the gentle Australians are much safer on the roads, with their mandatory helmet, than the harried Parisian (or Amsterdammer) who braves the busy city streets sans un casque (with no helmet)?

As it turns out, places that have mandatory helmet laws tend to have more bicycle accidents than places with no such laws.

Still, perhaps that's why they have the laws? As you can see in the picture above, in the Netherlands there are huge dedicated cycle lanes, separated from motor traffic. Perhaps the Sydney traffic is just so terrible - and the bike infrastructure so meagre - that biking is inherently super-dangerous and the helmet law is actually protecting people. Without the helmet law, the cycling accidents would be even more severe.

The counter-argument to this took me a while to understand, but it's the common refrain when you ask Dutch people (and many others) about why mandatory helmet laws are a bad idea. It begins with the principle that cycling is good. Cycling, as exercise, is good for your health. (If you're in an accident, it can be very bad for your health, and we'll address that later.) Cycling is also good for the public at large - if someone chooses to cycle, generally they're choosing not to drive. So each cyclist on the road means one fewer car on the road - this alleviates traffic. It's also good for the environment - one fewer car on the road means less air pollution.

So, from the point of view of maximizing the social good, cycling should be encouraged, and we should make bike-friendly policies. This includes bike lanes, subsidies for bike purchases or rentals, and more bike parking spots.

From this perspective, mandatory helmet laws discourage cycling, as it puts up a barrier to cycling. Forgot your helmet at home? Oh, you can't cycle. Don't have a helmet for a visiting friend? Oh, you can't cycle. This problem is especially amplified for bike-share systems like the one in Paris I have blogged about before. In Paris, you can just hop on a bike and nip down to the post office or wherever without a care in the world. In Sydney, you need to bring a helmet with you. (This may be part of why the Sydney bike share system is relatively unsuccessful.) Such a law also puts a burden on families, who need to buy new helmets every so often for their growing children.

I read a report from a Dutch advisory body (I would link to it, but I've forgotten where I saw it, and it's in Dutch...) which concluded that yes, there are some injuries that could have been avoided by wearing a helmet, but that the overall public health benefits of people cycling outweighed those injuries. Exercising is good and accompanied by a small risk, but the net outcome was a positive one for society in general. An extreme analogy would be that going to school is risky, because you could get hit by a bus and die, but the benefits of going to school and being educated outweigh the risk of dying by bus. The cold Dutch calculus concluded that helmet laws are unnecessary.

There are other problems with mandatory helmet laws. There is concern about how effective they actually are. I would wager that maybe 5-10% of the helmets I've seen worn in Paris were actually being worn incorrectly - not tight enough, pushed too far back on the head, and so on. A helmet only protects part of your head, not your jaw, or your torso, or many other vital body parts.

And then there's the psychology. There is evidence to suggest that wearing a helmet makes people feel safe, which is a problem because that encourages them to do more risky behaviour. Not just the cyclists - there have even been suggestions that motorists drive much more closely to cyclists wearing helmets than to those without. I know that I feel "naked" when I cycle without my helmet, and I wonder if that means that I take more risks when I am helmeted than when I am not - thereby increasing my chance of an accident. That's not what helmets are supposed to do!

Finally, I've heard philosophical arguments against helmet laws. Such laws put the onus of safety and protection on the cyclist, rather than on the system as a whole. Rather than asking cyclists to "be safe", why don't we work to make the environment safe? As I mentioned the biking infrastructure in the Netherlands is very advanced and helpful for safe cycling, quite unlike many US cities. (Still, a helmet law is cheaper and easier to enact than sweeping infrastructure changes...)

So what do I do? I wear a helmet when I cycle. I want to protect my brain, above all, since that's quite a useful organ for a professional researcher to have fully intact. Hopefully the helmet would protect me in case I have an accident; or perhaps it encourages risky behaviour from me and motorists around me? I'm not sure. Still, I don't think that a law mandating helmet use is a particularly useful piece of the puzzle in encouraging cycling. I'm glad to have the choice, and to be able to forget my helmet from time to time.

Cycling in Paris

A laid-back cyclist symbol on a side street.

Paris has an excellent metro system, which moves 4 million people a day. There's also an extensive bus and larger commuter train service. More recently, however, the city officials have been trying to encourage more cycling, partly to reduce traffic congestion (of which there is a lot), and to improve health and well-being. This means that recently there have been a number of bike-friendly changes to the road infrastructure. There are several bike lanes, of various degrees of separation from the traffic, and also bikes are able to share the bus-and-taxi lanes. Several one-way streets are actually two-way for bikes, which makes navigation easier, and at some traffic lights there are signs indicating that bikes can proceed (either forward or to the right) at a red light, if the coast is clear. On Sundays and public holidays, some roads near the centre of town are closed to all non-bike non-pedestrian traffic. And there was the journée sans voiture, when cars were banned from the city centre. Still, even with those bike-friendly policies, surely it's a terrifying notion to go out onto the road with wild Frenchmen? After all, tourists (Brits and Americans alike) return with crazy stories about the frenetic, chaotic traffic in Paris. And there is video proof!

Well, I've been cycling to work more or less since I began in September, and I can tell you: Paris is a joy to cycle in. Outside of Amsterdam, I can't think of a large city that I would rather cycle in. Let me explain why.

Other cyclists

First of all, strength in numbers. It's much easier to brave the streets when there's a whole gang of cyclists you're moving with than when you're on your own. On my way to work, I routinely cycle with at least one or two other cyclists who happen to be going the same way at about the same speed. Total strangers, but we stick together on the road and feel safer. On the way back it's not uncommon to see about half a dozen others, especially on the busier roads. This feature isn't unique to Paris, of course, but it makes cycling easier, especially for a relative novice like myself.

Other road users

The first thing to understand about the traffic in Paris (and many other large European cities like Rome) is the preponderance of motorized scooters and small motorbikes. They are everywhere, and they zip around everyone. They go in bike lanes, bus lanes, they jump red lights, they'll even go on the pavement (sidewalk, for the American readers) to get around an obstacle. This is not to say that it's totally anarchic - I'm definitely over-emphasizing their wildness - but simply that these motorbikes are an established part of the Parisian traffic.

From the perspective of a car driver, then, a bicycle is just a smaller, slower, more timid moped. The car drivers are used to looking out for mopeds, checking their blind spots, being conscious of allowing them to filter through traffic. As a consequence, they're very conscientious of bikes. There have been several times, when I move past a line of stopped cars to get to the front at a red light, that a car has actually moved slightly to give me more space to get past. I've almost never seen that happen in the US or the UK.

Another thing to understand about Paris traffic is something that sounds quite obvious - the laws are different here. The rules of the road, and of who has right of way, are quite different to those of the US and UK (and quite unintuitive if you were raised in either of those systems). While Brits may think the French traffic to be chaotic, the French think British traffic is inflexible. There have been maybe three times when I have misunderstood the rules of the road and turned when I didn't have right of way, and so on. Each time, rather than tooting their horn and yelling at me, car drivers have slowed and allowed me to pass, even though they had every right to continue. It seems that bike-riders are extended some courtesy - even excessive courtesy - which is perhaps not extended to other car drivers.

The Velib' system

Paris has a bike-share system called Velib' (a blend of vélo "bike" and liberté "freedom"). There are similar systems in many other cities you may be familiar with (like Toronto, Columbus, London, and others). In case you're not familiar, here's a brief explanation of how it works:

A bike station with some attached bikes.

There are bike stations all over the city, each with several bikes attached. You scan your card on the bike stand of the bike you want, and the bike is released and you can take it. When you're finished, just park it back at any other bike station, and you're good.

The bike is free for the first thirty minutes, and after that you pay a small amount per half hour. There is also a subscription cost - 1.70€ for a day, 8€ for a week, or 29€ for a year. Yes, a year's subscription at only 29€, which gives you free half-hour bike rentals. Much cheaper than buying and maintaining your own bike.

The cupboard was bare!

It's possible that when you go to return the bike, the station is full. Or that when you want a bike, the station is empty. Luckily, there are stations everywhere. There are over 1,000 stations, and over 30,000 bikes, in the entire system. It's the largest bike-share system outside of China.

The bikes are of varying quality. Sometimes the brakes are iffy, or there's a punctured tyre or broken chain. Thankfully, an informal system has sprung up where if someone notices if a bike is bad, they turn the seat to face backwards. That way it's easy to see at a glance if a bike is suitable. I've had a few duds but mostly the bikes are good, and the stations are so common it's easy to drop off a bad bike and exchange it for another.

My route to work

Finally the last reason that cycling in Paris is so enjoyable is the reason that many things in Paris are enjoyable - it's Paris! Every day on my way to work I get to see the Notre Dame, (a glimpse of) the Eiffel Tower, the Place de la Bastille, the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, the Jardin des Plantes, the Grand Mosque of Paris, and many other sights. It's very exciting!

Cycling is Paris is not as scary as it may seem at first, and there's lots of ways that it's been made more pleasurable than it could be. I definitely enjoy having the freedom to cycle around, rather than having to be squeezed into a metro train or a bus. If you come to Paris, let me take you out cycling :-)