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”.
Bruh, it’s not that deep. Statistics show that wearing a helmet reduces chances to severe head and brain injuries.
I don’t care since I am not discussing helmet mandates.
As for the rest, obviously it’s better to prevent accidents in the first place and obviously we need to reduce the number of cars on our streets for multiple reasons. But that’s all policy while wearing a helmet is a cheap and easy way to protect yourself against unavoidable accidents and avoidable accidents while waiting and advocating for policy change.
Common bicycle helmet
Common motorcycle helmet
Are you really telling me that in the horizontal axis the first doesn’t have a far bigger ratio of major-axis to minor-axis than the second?
Never disputed. After all a hat too will “reduce chances to severe head and brain injuries”, though by a tiny amount.
The point was always about how much and if in the typical conditions of city cycling it is enough to offset possible negative effects such as increase risk taking and less careful behavior from drivers around cyclists who are better protected.
It’s about aggregated effects rather than this one specific thing you focused on to the exclusion of everything else. If you focus on one thing alone then “always wear a hat when you cycle” would count as a safety recommendation for cyclists.
Mind you from our discussions I did shift my position to think it’s a good idea in overall to recommend people to wear a helmet when cycling (mainly because of the study you linked that reviewed various papers and found too little indication of a risk compensation effect), though not on mandatory helmet wearing because there the broader implications - as shown by the experience of Australia - are that all in all it causes more deaths because of the indirect effect of people cycling less hence dying in greater numbers because of the higher mortality for people who don’t regularly exercise. There’s also the point I quoted from the Dutch that in terms of policy aiming for second prevention (such as cyclist protection equipment) negatively impacts the investment in primary prevention (i.e. a safer cycling environment).
I don’t quite understand what you are arguing about. I thought the discussion was about whether wearing a helmet while cycling increases or decreases one’s safety and especially one’s risk for serious head/brain injuries.
I never made any statements about mandatory helmet rules, effects of helmet shapes etc. I encourage wearing helmets and made some speculations about how an individual’s decision to wear a helmet could be encouraged, that’s it.