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”.
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.
“Helmet shapes that transform linear shocks into rotational shocks are more dangerous” was literally just one thing I threw in as maybe, part, of the cause of those numbers I had read about in Denmark, which was a single line in a much broader discussion.
(I never actually said that it totally offsets other effects, by the way, I just thought it was a contributing factor for the counter-intuitive results I had read in that study)
You just then grabbed that one “maybe this part of it” line of mine and ran with it as if I was claiming that wearing a helmet doesn’t reduce the risk of head injuries, something I did not and even though I actually wrote three times (including in the post immediately after your first reply) that wearing a helmet does reduce the risk of head injuries.
As for the rest, as I basically said in the last paragraph of the last post, yeah, based on the recent study you linked that shows there is no clear evidence for a risk compensation effect, so as per all evidence wearing helmet when cycling is safer than not because the helmet does protect the head and if there is no risk compensation effect then there is no indirect increase in risk (due to riskier behaviors) from wearing a helmet. What I remember from what I read as per my original post was a tiny effect (something like 2%) so maybe that was within the error margin. I mean, I’m pretty sure I read about it over a decade ago and you linked to a study which is more recent than that.
You kept repeating that part so much and made it look so important I thought you were pointing to that as a caveat.
Then I guess we were feeding each other’s misunderstanding.
Those numbers from Denmark stuck in my mind for all these years exactly because I though they were counter-intuitive, and I thought they were counter-intuitive exactly because “helmets reduce the risk of head injury” is pretty much indisputable.
Well, good thing we could clear that misunderstanding then.
To finally actually say something about this: I guess it’s possible that on impacts at certain angles, a helmet’s shape can have some influence on injuries. But those seems to be such rare circumstances that I doubt it does have a visible expressions on statistics.