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.
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