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.