{"id":182844,"date":"2021-04-06T12:59:23","date_gmt":"2021-04-06T12:59:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.welovecycling.com\/wide\/?p=182844"},"modified":"2021-04-06T12:59:23","modified_gmt":"2021-04-06T12:59:23","slug":"is-there-a-final-verdict-on-bicycle-helmets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.welovecycling.com\/wide\/2021\/04\/06\/is-there-a-final-verdict-on-bicycle-helmets\/","title":{"rendered":"Is There a Final Verdict on Bicycle Helmets?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Let’s try and find out if there’s an ultimate answer to the ‘do you need to wear a helmet on a bike’ question.<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

According to a 2013 study by the American Association of Neurological Surgeons, cycling accidents played a role<\/a>\u00a0in some 86,000 of the 447,000 sports-related head injuries treated in emergency rooms in 2009. By comparison, American football accounted for about 47,000 of those head injuries<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As a result, a variety of safety organizations, cycling associations and other cycling stakeholders have for years insisted that the solution to cycling head injuries and fatalities is wearing a helmet. But not everyone agrees and there have been spirited discussions about the benefits of wearing bicycle helmets over the years. Just stating the argument seems to be counterintuitive because one would think that it must be safer to ride with a helmet since it protects the head much better than wearing nothing at all. So, do you need to wear a helmet on a bike?<\/p>\n

\"Cycling<\/a>
What’s the final verdict on helmets? \u00a9 Profimedia<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

According to Dorothy Robinson of the Bicycle Helmet Research Foundation, \u201cCountries where cycling is safest \u2013 those with low fatality rates per cycle-km \u2013 typically have high cycling rates but low helmet wearing. This indicates that helmets make only a minor contribution to overall cyclist safety. In fact, a review of the best quality data (where enforced helmet laws produced increases of at least 40 percentage points in helmet wearing) found no evidence of reduced head injury rates<\/a> in response to the increases in helmet wearing.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the other hand, an analysis<\/a> in the International Journal of Epidemiology from February 2017 concluded, after reviewing 40 separate studies, that helmet use by cyclists significantly reduced the odds of an injury, both fatal and not. How do you make sense out of those apparently contradictory conclusions?<\/p>\n

To begin with, according to the site usa.streetsblog.org, the country with the highest percentage of helmet use, the U.S. (about 55 per cent), also had the highest cyclist fatality rate per distance travelled. On the other hand, the Netherlands, where almost no cyclist wears a helmet, was much safer<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The reason? Better\u00a0street design and getting\u00a0more people on bikes \u2013 not blind faith in\u00a0helmets \u2013 are the keys to making\u00a0cycling safer. This has been corroborated by research. A Canadian study<\/a> found that helmet laws\u00a0had\u00a0no relationship to hospitalization rates, whether in areas where helmets were mandated and there was a high degree of self-reported helmet wearing or in areas where there was far less.<\/p>\n

\"Cyclist<\/a>
Cycling becomes safer with better cycling infrastructure. \u00a9 Profimedia<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

What worked much better was having a higher rate of cycling in the community. Using Canadian government data on cycling activity, researchers found that men and women were both less likely to be injured while biking in communities where more\u00a0people bike.<\/p>\n

The reason is that the more people in a community bike, the more likely the community is to improve the cycling infrastructure, especially by establishing a path network that separates the cyclists from motorized traffic. This is why advocacy groups in the U.S. focus so much on improving cycling infrastructure.<\/a> Helmets do help mitigate specific head injuries but organizations such as People for Bikes want to prevent those crashes \u2013 particularly collisions between cars and bikes \u2013 from happening at all.<\/p>\n

In a perverse way, mandatory helmet use can then actually lead to higher injury rates because it can dissuade people from riding bikes. When helmet use was made mandatory in New Zealand in 1994, the number of trips fell by 51 per cent over the next 10 years<\/a>. And, as we\u2019ve seen, fewer cyclists mean less infrastructure improvement, which means more accidents.<\/p>\n

This doesn\u2019t mean you shouldn\u2019t wear a helmet when cycling or, more importantly, not put a helmet on your child. It simply means that all cyclists, whether they wear helmets or not, should cycle responsibly and lobby their local authorities to upgrade the infrastructure to put them out of harm\u2019s way \u2013 that is, away from cars.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Let’s try and find out if there’s an ultimate answer to the ‘do you need to wear a helmet on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":182845,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[335],"tags":[5102,5105,5101,5103,5104,396],"global-categories":[3366],"class_list":["post-182844","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-safety","tag-bicycle-helmet","tag-bicycle-helmet-research-foundation","tag-bike-helmet","tag-do-you-need-to-wear-a-helmet","tag-international-journal-of-epidemiology","tag-safety","global-categories-cycling"],"yoast_head":"\nDo You Need to Wear a Helmet on a Bike? - We Love Cycling<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Let's try and find out if there's an ultimate answer to the 'do you need to wear a helmet on a bike' question. 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