In fact, I'll tell you another anecdote. I started wearing a hockey helmet in 1972, after my wife fainted on a bike ride, crashed and hit her head. (I'll tell you that story another time.) In the spring of 1973, I went on my first bike rally, CoNYMA, held in a location near the CT/NY/MA border. I was wearing a hockey helmet, and so was a fellow I met there, Irv Weisman, who was then the Technical Editor of the League of American Wheelmen Bulletin, LAW's monthly magazine. At the start of the first ride, he and I took a lot of ribbing from attendees. Halfway through the ride, a couple of guys crashed and one of them had his scalp peeled right from his head. It was pretty gruesome. For the entire second half of the ride, people kept riding up to us and asking where did we get those helmets.
I've been riding with bike clubs for over 40 years. In that time, I've crashed a number of times. Not one had anything to do with a car. I've crashed because of black ice, sand on the road, a pothole, a fallen tree limb, an eroded exposed tree root, a crack between lanes on a concrete road, and more than once I've had inattentive riders crash into me when I stopped for a stop sign or traffic light. I've been on rides where people have crashed on gravel, on an oil slick, on the base of a safety cone, on wet leaves or on railroad tracks, and have ridden off the roadway and crashed when they tried to ride back up on the edge and slipped off, and I crashed once in a similar situation myself. I came within a half-second of crashing when an animal rode out in front of me, I've met people who hit a deer and crashed, and a friend of mine died when an animal ran in front of him as he was making a high speed descent.
I'm concerned with each and every one of those road hazard situations, and they -- and not fear of cars -- are the reason I wear a helmet. And by the way, none of those situations provide a reason to wear a helmet while out walking.
I can't say much about why people won't ride, other than my sister -- who crashed on gravel when she was a child, and went through such a gruesome and painful process of gravel extraction and wound debriding she decided never to risk riding again.
On 11/25/2015 04:14 PM, 'Mark in Beacon' via RBW Owners Bunch wrote:
Your anecdote is interesting, but it has nothing to do with the statement I made. I believe a. many more people would ride bikes if cars were more under control, and b. many of them would not be concerned about a helmet.On Wednesday, November 25, 2015 at 9:32:14 AM UTC-5, Steve Palincsar wrote:On 11/24/2015 10:30 PM, 'Mark in Beacon' via RBW Owners Bunch wrote:Can someone tell me how being killed by a motor vehicle on a bicycle is any different than being killed by a motor vehicle while walking? If it can save you in a bike/car collision, it can save you in a person/car collision. Leaving aside any "data" that proves or disproves the safety value of helmets, I would hazard a guess that the existence of cars is the major reason most cyclists wear helmets.It's not even the reason for the existence of helmets. Back in 1972 I met the guy responsible for prodding Bell and MSR into manufacturing bike helmets. He was an engineer living in Rochester NY. He'd been introduced to cycling by a close friend who was president of the local cycling club. The two of them were riding a century when a dog ran out in front of his friend; the two tangled and the cyclist went down, struck his head and died of a brain injury. He told us about his campaign to convince helmet manufacturers to produce something light and cool enough that a cyclist could wear it but that still would have kept his friend alive. A couple of years later, when I was chairing the workshops committee for GEAR 1974 in Poughkeepsie, he'd succeeded: MSR introduced a bike helmet based on its rock climbing helmet, and he did a workshop at that rally demonstrating the new helmet. The most striking part of it was when at the front of a classroom full of people, he put on the MSR helmet and struck himself over the head with an indian club, and then asked the group, "Who would like to try that with your leather hairnet?" A few of the members of our club, the Mid-Hudson Bicycle Club, purchased the new MSR helmets. Later that year, one of the members, a gifted cyclist and agile athlete - an engineer at IBM - crashed at night riding home from work when he rode over what he thought was a shadow but turned out to be a downed tree limb. His helmet broke into many pieces, but all he got was a slight headache. The doctors at the ER told him without a doubt he would have been killed outright without the helmet. The club organized a group buy and by next spring everyone in the club was wearing a helmet.Will wrote: /If data indicates that helmets mitigate head damage and if you choose to ignore that data... whose lives have you compromised? Yours? For sure./ That is simply putting your values onto another person. Compared to not existing for the last 13.82 billion years, and not existing till the end of time, we're all here for a really, really really short visit, whether that be 1 month or 100 years. To some degree, we all get to choose the risks we are willing to live with (ha ha) during our little frolic. Skydiving. Bathtub gin. Getting married. Pulling the tags off your mattress. Then there is fate. And the government--obviously the sheer number of deaths from automobile accidents before seatbelts was costing society a lot of money. It still does--about 871 billion a year <http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/05/29/steep-economic-toll-of-crashes/9715893/> as of 2010. Because now we have seatbelts--and phones, and movies, and internet, and typing, in a car. But then, we humans do weird stuff. Like the war on terror. That cost trillions, and all it did was create more terrorists. We're not very good at addressing root causes. We prefer ineffective band-aids that usually not only add unnecessary complexity, but also make things an order of magnitude worse. The idea that we must all run around with helmets is like blaming the victim. Most of the people behind these types of studies have some kind of agenda, and not always the one you would think. People ignore "data" all the time. For instance, there is plenty of data available that cars are a factor in climate change, among numerous other ills they cause, including sprawl, huge infrastructure costs, etc. etc. etc. Using a 2-3,000 pound object to move around a single human being? Now /that/ is compromising all of us. Insisting everyone wear helmets, thereby reducing the number of people who bicycle? Nah. What we should really be doing is not designing "better" helmets. We should be designing cars that can't maim people. Better, we should be encouraging people not to use cars. What we should be doing is insisting those caught texting or phoning and causing harm in a car go to jail. Every time. For a long time. But we are not only good at ignoring data, we are champions of rationalizing irrational beliefs and behaviors. Meanwhile, much more relevant, my Clementine is due Monday! On Tuesday, November 24, 2015 at 9:45:55 PM UTC-5, Steve Palincsar wrote: On 11/24/2015 09:25 PM, Eric Norris wrote:Not that cycling is that dangerous, but I'd like to see the data showing that "walking on the street" is more dangerous than riding a bike.Or that walking on the street presents a danger that is specifically addressed by the wearing of a helmet.On a personal level, I've lost several friends/acquaintances over the past year, killed by motor vehicles while riding their bikes. I can't think of a single incident among my friends, fatal or otherwise, that happened while they were "walking on the street."There are plenty of pedestrians run down by motor vehicles, many of whom are killed each year. However, it's unlikely that wearing a helmet would have saved many. It's basically a specious argument.-- You received this message because you are subscribed to theGoogle Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. 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