The safety organisation VeiligheidNL estimates that 5,000 fatbike riders are treated in A&E [ i.e Accident & Emergency] departments each year, on the basis of a recent sample of hospitals. “And we also see that especially these young people aged from 12 to 15 have the most accidents,” said the spokesperson Tom de Beus.
Now Amsterdam’s head of transport, Melanie van der Horst, has said “unorthodox measures” are needed and has announced that she will ban these heavy electric bikes from city parks, starting in the Vondelpark. Like the city of Enschede, which is also drawing up a city centre ban, she is acting on a stream of requests “begging me to ban the fatbikes”.
You writting one after the other just makes clear you’re hugely biased in this as you basically put forward an absolute statement of yours “wearing a helmet is always safe” as objective truth whilst studies “typically are biased” or in other words, you know better than studies.
Definitelly agree that using numbers from injuries of cyclists with helmets in The Netherlands without any further considerations yields biased results for the reasons you described. It’s not by chance that I did not quote such figures at all and in fact explicitly said from the start that people doing things like speed cycling and mountain biking should wear a helmet.
No idea were you pulled that specific argument you decided to counter in a response to my posts.
Specifically for The Netherlands and from the last link in my previous post, the only thing about them is the general belief there that “Promoting the use of bicycle helmets runs counter to present government policies that are aimed at the primary prevention of crashes (as opposed to secondary prevention) and at stimulating the use of the bicycle as a general health measure” which is really about not having mandatory helmet laws because it reduces cycling in general and how it’s more important to push for safe cycling conditions (such as good cycle paths) than for cyclists wearing protection, all of which makes sense.
Personally I think that wearing a helmet or not should be down to each cyclist and should take in account the conditions they are cycling under, always remembering that wearing a helmet is not a silver bullet. My own experience of cycling in different countries (The Netherlands, England, Germany, Portugal) and different conditions is that the level of risk can be very different sometimes even from city to city, making helmet use more or less important relative to other things.
Again and above all, always keep in mind that wearing a helmet is not going to make you totally or even mostly safe, if only to avoid the increase risk taking due to a sense of increase safety exceeding the actual amount of increased safety from a helmet - as per risk compensation theory - which ultimatelly can make you less safe.
In my view your whole “wearing a helmet is always safer” absolutist posture is a needlessly dangerous mindset to have - it’s far better to have a far more general approach to cycling safety in city traffic (which is basically what I went with when I moved from cycling in the far safer Dutch conditions to cycling in London, meaning that I ran around with all sorts of risk mitigation practices not just towards motorists on the road but even towards pedestrians in the sidewalk that were even adjusted depending in the area of London I was in) that thinking that just a helmet will make you safe.