Annals of Cycling – 32
An occasional update on items from the Velo-city.
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WHY COMPULSORY HELMET LAWS ARE NOT GOING TO CHANGE
Because of reports like this - from SmartRisk.
And here is my take on the issue – as reported while at a conference in Melbourne.
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BIKES BY CARS
The ideal customer for these bikes are people who want the name Porsche or BMW on their down tube,” says Andrew Bernstein, gear editor at Bicycling magazine. “But in some cases you’re actually buying something unique and cutting edge, as with many of these e-bikes. The great thing about them is you can bike to work and not get there sweaty.”
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THE BETTER WAY
From the Toronto Star, in which “The Fixer” columnist, Jack Lakey, goes for a ride.
After trying it for a day, we discovered a secret behind the growth of cycling as legitimate transportation: It is exhilarating, fun and connects riders to the environment in a way that is entirely lost on drivers. …
It was a revealing experience for a guy who had thought of bikes as more of a toy than a real vehicle, one that should be tried by any driver guilty of making the same mistake.
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A GOOD READ
Source on all things cycling, Ron Richings sends in a plug:
“On Bicycles” features 33 writers (including me) who show how cycling has changed their lives, how it is changing life in your city and how it can similarly change you.
It will cure what ails you, make your life more complete, satisfy your spiritual needs, and make it seem like you are always riding downhill. Plus no more zits, flatulence, or embarrassing bodily secretions.
Don’t believe that a mere book (or cycling) can do all of these things? Well, buy a copy and see. And prepare to be amazed.
Website: http://www.OnBicycles.com
Facebook Page: http://tinyurl.com/3g678zt
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Love the unrelated statistics and unjustified conclusion.
If you forget those pesky other factors like number of crashes and exposure in terms of number of riders and distance it’s all very neat, isn’t it? Decrease in head injuries = helmets working. Increase in head injuries = more helmets needed. What a racket.
@Brian Gould
I’m not following you. The number of cycling injuries in general was about the same, and that serves as a de facto control on factors such as number of cyclists and changes in cycling infrastructure that affect safety. It’s the percentage of those admissions that were head injuries that’s going down. And that coincides with increased helmet use.
While I’m aware that correlation is not the same as cause, you’re going to need to do better than your comment above to dissuade people in the face of this evidence.
Personally, I’m kind of on the fence regarding the issue. I wear a helmet myself, but I’m not convinced that society is best served overall by requiring helmets. They don’t dissuade me from riding, but I can see the logic in an argument that they’re enough of a barrier to dissuade people in numbers such that the loss in overall health benefits of cycling outweigh the gains in reduced head injuries. And I think this argument is even stronger when a bike sharing system is available, since these systems largely remove the availability of the bike itself as an obstacle.
That having been said, I think the view of society at large is along the lines of “helmets are to cyclists as seat belts are to motorists”, and society seems to have settled pretty firmly on the necessity of seat belts. So talking people out of mandatory helmet laws will require some pretty fancy footwork, particularly in the face of studies such as the one Gordon has pointed out to us.
For the sake of argument, let’s assume that total injuries is a valid proxy for exposure (even though we really need distance traveled or similar). In order to prove that increased helmet use is reducing serious head injuries, don’t we first need to prove that helmet use is increasing? I’m not even asking for the study to control for every other possible factor, just to give me a sign that they even looked at something even resembling an X for what they’re declaring to affect their Y. All I see is the Y.
Once we get there, then we can talk about whether a law had anything to do with that. Hopefully better than with the arguments in St. Albert, which saw an increase from 74% to 80% – 74% of what and 80% of what? A 7.5% decrease in ridership would offset that, but we don’t know what happened to ridership, or what happened in similar communities without a helmet law.
http://www.stalbert.ca/04-21-2011-helmet-laws-effective/?id=1847
The conclusions simply do not follow from the studies, which are really just scraps of data. The burden of proof is on those who wish to impose laws, since they claim the justification to act.
I wear my styrofoam hat, whether I am required to or not. This does not mean that I am convinced that it does any good, or that we should persecute those who do not.
@Brian Gould
OK, I getcha. Yes, that is indeed a good point and in the 10-15 minutes I spent on Google I wasn’t able to come up with anything that documented trends in helmet use in Canada for the time period of the study.
I suppose one must ask the question, though: if the drop in head injury stats isn’t due to increased helmet use, what else might it be due to? Whatever it is, it seems like it ought to be something we should encourage.
Perhaps the good news is that it seems like Stats Canada is starting to gather this this kind of data, so maybe 10 years from now we’ll have something to look at. A bit of a while to wait, though…
Kudos to your willingness to Google, I wasted most of my initiative trying to dig up the brief they referenced in the press release. Nothing in there either.
I don’t have a ready-made hypothesis, as I leave that up to those doing the actual studies. However, I’d posit that what we’re looking for, based on that limited data, is something that changes the ratio between serious head injuries and other hospitalizations. Bike helmets are reputed to be much less effective above 25 kph and in car-involved collisions, so perhaps the rise in cycling and cyclist separation has reduced the number of opportunities and introduced slower (non-lycra clad) utilitarian riders. Perhaps the definition and diagnosis of a severe head injury has changed. I don’t know, I’m just spitballing (it’s not really my area), but I do know that this study fails even to show correlation.
Sorry, what info is coming from Stats Can? I was under the impression that their transportation data was biased toward longest and “primary” trip mode (i.e. likely not cycling) like the US, but I could be mistaken. That being said, I don’t expect the quality to get any better, or even be comparable to the old data from here on out with the dumping of the long form.
Brian Gould: “Sorry, what info is coming from Stats Can? ”
I found this table of helmet usage by gender and age group for 2009/2010: http://www40.statcan.gc.ca/l01/cst01/health93b-eng.htm
The numbers seem low to me based on what I see when I’m out and about.
When a study starts by qualifying cycling as a “summer sports and recreational activities”
It doesn’t worth to be read any further…
And, Brian Gould is certainly right…the conclusion of the study are obvious fallacy reflecting more the wish of a lobby than a reality: of the ground.
Brian Gould says positing on “road safety” are again probably the right answer:
Number from Europe, on similar period, shows an average reduction of 30% of cyclist fatalities
(basically not only no-one where an helmet in Europe, but cycling usage has increased dramatically in the study perido, making the number even more impressive)
You could also find in the literature that a constant diminution of head trauma injury proportion is a trend observed since the late 1980′s, for all road users, be motorist, cyclist and pedestrian…
They are enough corpus of evidence to show that the helmet law has nothing to do with that.
and no a helmet law is not like a seat belt law…
Studies overwhelmingly demonstrated that the seat belt laws have had positive effect on the road safety – and for this reason are widespread in all the countries, and all Europe including Copenhagen.
Because, not only you can’t prove any positive effect for the Helmet law, but could demonstrate they are criminal law, and the raw data of the CIHI study linked by Price says that (it is twice safer to cycling in helmet free law Qc than in Bc, and Alberta became less safe for cyclist after introduction of the helmet law)…
Basically no one outside commonwealth countries adopted those silly laws.
What Sean call the “view of society at large is along the lines of “helmets are to cyclists as seat belts are to motorists”,” is like to says the “view of society is there is WMD in Irak”
Both misconception has been firmly entrenched in English speaking world, but obviously
a belief doesn’t make a truth and English world is not the society which doesn’t follow them in their errands…they have been proven wrong for the WMD…
and now, even Israel has repelled, at least partially, its criminal helmet law…and that is the new trend for country doing due diligence on the topic…
BTW, I was just reading that the Green party program was to ban cycle from Vancouver street
To be sure, that is a good policy to reduce the cyclist’s head injuries statistic in Vancouver.
…The Adriane Carr views on cycling are also the real reason why we have helmet law…and those views are backward.and need to be challenged.
Voony FTW!
Thanks for the link, Sean.
I wasn’t able to dig out comparable transportation information (and even if I had teased out travel mode to work, it’s hardly a good proxy for exposure), but I did get a breakdown by province of your helmet figures:
2010:
Canada: 37%
QC: 28%
ON: 34%
MB: 20%
SK: 24%
AB: 47%
BC: 61%
Honestly I’m not sure whether that tells us enough since it doesn’t have a time component. Having been on the streets of Toronto last week, I’d say that’s about right.
Need to figure out where Ron van der Eerden dug up his “Canada Census figures show that commuter cycling mode share growth was 860 per cent higher in provinces without helmet legislation in the 10-year period that helmet laws came into effect in several provinces.” Think I’ve exhausted my time on this topic though, too many other project piling up.
http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/editorial/story.html?id=42e2664b-ed51-4a05-8e4a-ac488e1bd9ec
Here’s a line from a 2000 report on the BC helmet law: http://www.hsrc.unc.edu/pdf/2000/bc_rpt.pdf
“The large majority of less serious injuries,
including 75% of non-fatal head injuries, occur in crashes (or ‘falls’) that do not
involve a motor vehicle”
The 75% of the head injuries that do not involve motor vehicles are also the 75% that we are most likely to use helmets; we are more likely to use helmets for recreational/mountain biking. The majority of human walking injuries are also falls, does that mean that they should wear helmets too?
The report then goes on to make the flawed comparison of helmets to Seatbelts. Like Brian said above, it does not compare X with Y, it only gives Y.
Encouraging helmet use may even have a better result than mandating helmet use.
The report has also misses the point. It writes pages and pages on how the helmet use has increase, and how we wear helmets improperly, but no one has denied that helmets reduce head injuries. But we have and are advocating for the safety issue to be decided by ourselves instead of by the government.
@ voony, even though it disproves our argument, some studies have shown that seatbelts encourage more reckless behavior (just like helmets do), so there can be some connection between those.
This page: http://www.cycle-helmets.com/canada_helmets.html has so many useful studies and reports that you may want to go over. It mentions how biking in Nova scotia was cut 62% !!! after the helmet law was introduced, with increased head injuries. It even mentions the Vancouver bike share program.
@sean I guess I’m a better googler than you are