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.

New Zealand, Part 1

First, a word about Paris. It seems our trip to New Zealand came at a fortuitous time. Whether it was divine intervention or random circumstance, for some reason we were not meant to be in Paris at the time of the terrorist attacks. I am infinitely grateful for this fact, but it was still heart-wrenching and frightening to learn that several of the attacks took place very close to our home. When the attack locations were published, I instantly recognized two of the streets as ones I often travel on. In fact, I walked past the Bataclan concert venue just over a week ago when buying a suitcase for our trip. And we have friends who go to work every day very near the attack sites. It's a decent, relatively safe neighborhood populated by hard-working Parisians, and now terrorists have shattered any feelings of safety and security that once existed. It was our home, is our home, and this tragedy has changed it forever.

New Zealand, however, is the perfect antidote to violence and hatred. In what has to be one of the most beautiful, serene, and majestic countries in the world, it seems impossible not to be kind and loving to each other. I want to tell you about all of the amazing things we've seen in only five and a half days, but I'll start at the beginning of our journey and take you there in shorter instalments. It hasn't been the smoothest ride.

Mon, Nov 9 - Wed, Nov 11
We left in the evening, flying from Paris to Dubai overnight on Emirates Airlines. Emirates is a nice airline. They give you a hot towel at the start of every flight, they feed you frequently (you can choose one of their many types of special meals if you have dietary restrictions), and they have hundreds of movies and shows for you to watch. So it was a fine, sleepless 6-hour flight, then we arrived in Dubai (a very blingy and commercial airport), and a little while later we headed to Bangkok on a 5.5 hour flight. Again, no sleep for Talia. I don't do well with sleeping on planes, unfortunately. Next we had a one-hour "break" in Bangkok while they refuelled the plane and we were herded through security in the airport. Then we hopped back on the newly cleaned plane and flew to Sydney. This time it was an 8-hour flight. By this point, I was sore, exhausted, and really not looking forward to an even longer flight. Rory successfully slept for a good portion of this one so as to align his body with New Zealand time. I, however, did not. Finally we made it to Sydney and I'm practically bounding off the plane. It's only two more hours to Christchurch! I'm nearly done! I'll survive! Hallelujah! We got back on the plane for the last time. And then something unfortunate happened.

Sleepless in Bangkok, attempting to smile

Food poisoning. I'll spare you the gory details, but suffice it to say that I quickly realized I had a serious problem. I suspect the culprit came from one of my Emirates gluten-free meals; my hunch is that it was a salad with tuna on top. Future gluten-free Emirates travellers, beware. I spent most of the flight in agony in the tiny lavatory, and once we arrived in Christchurch, for the next two days I alternated between being miserable in bed and being miserable in the bathroom. This was my first experience with food poisoning, and I have to say, I'd rather not try it again.

By Friday, I was well enough to get out of the house a bit, and Rory and I had initially planned to spend the weekend travelling, so I didn't want to waylay those plans with my illness. Not yet feeling completely better, we rented a car and began to make our way up the east coast of the south island. It was a mostly wonderful journey with breathtaking scenery and experiences. But you can read all about that in Part 2.