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 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.