> It probably was a pretty rare case. There's been a fair amount of British
> research into this topic, most recently the study discussed in this
> article:
>
> http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/Home/Cycle-helmets-useless-in-serious-accidents-claims-report-08032012.htm
>
> That doesn't go into much depth on the findings, but the studies usually
> say that the overwhelming majority of cycling fatalities occur when a
> cyclist gets dragged under the wheels of a left-turning truck, for which
> you'd pretty much need full body armour to survive, if even that. I'm not
> sure if those findings are applicable outside Britain and Ireland (of
> course if they were it would be a right-turning truck), but I can't think
> offhand of any reason why they wouldn't be.
>
Thanks, Wendy. Here's the full article
http://www.cycle-helmets.com/jme-helmets.pdf
it is useful because it is actually an ethical discussion - the lead author is a medical doctor who's getting a PhD in law and ethics and is making a name for himself by writing on public health issues that are the subject of pending legislation. This piece has gotten a lot of play, in part because it's primary objective appears to be providing some philosophical ammunition to people opposed to a proposed helmet law. Thus a lot of cycling communities seem to be forwarding it around. The subtitle seems to say it all, though the authors claim they aren't for a completely minimal government. More on this below.
It doesn't say much about the way fatalities are caused - and in fact the data is pretty fuzzy in general because there aren't really clear records.
The index they seem to use in this study is to look at places where helmet laws have been enacted and to compare whether this has had any effect on fatalities. It's a messy index which doesn't include anything about serious brain injury - a subject, its worth noting, that recent research seems to be finding more prevalent in general than previously understood.
The rise in incidence (or at least diagnosis) of TBI and the new understandings being developed around the long term effects of untreated concussions suggest that there can be a lot of things going on that won't appear in statistics. I admit that this is more of my personal reason for wearing the helmet: death isn't necessarily what scares me (though I'm not generally a fan), it's living with some fried circuits that make me a chunk of meat other people have to worry about. None of this shows up in the statistics they cite. More importantly, this points to at least two arguments that don't show up in this piece.
Before I mention those, I'll say that this article is somewhat incidental to the conversation here in that it's main target is the legislation itself. They maintain that helmets do reduce the risk in some way (though they can't exactly say how much) and that the government should merely inform citizens and let them make their own decisions rather than mandating helmets for cyclists. The conversation here seems to be whether they mitigate any risk at all. While this study (and others you hint at) may show that this is questionable (for adults anyway - they say kids under 16 should be forced to wear them), even they admit that there is an information problem here. Meaning that just providing information is a difficult task as they signal to noise ratio is pretty high. When you add to this the claim that people who wear helmets are likely to take more risks because they think themselves safer, it may indeed be a wash. Here I'd just mention - in response to your question about whether a UK study is the same as effect in the US - that this is likely something that would differ significantly depending on a lot of cultural and environmental factors. It's probably true that a helmet wouldn't help me much if I was going up against a lot of Ford F150s, which is generally the case in TX; but if it was mostly me against the Prius, Minis and Fiats it might make a bigger difference.
On the other hand, several people in these threads seem to make a rather different, more counterintiutive argument, which is that drivers respond with more trepidation to bikers who don't wear helmets. I can't tell how much of this is just anecdotal or how much is driven by data (shag's post seems to indicate there is some of the latter). But it's worth noting that these studies take place in a culture where it is generally agreed that helmets make people safer. This may not be a statistically true belief, but if we are speaking solely in behavioural terms of how drivers respond to bikers, and whether bikers might therefore be paradoxically safer from driver harm were they to forego helmets, eroding this perception of helmets=safety would therefore erode that paradoxical effect, making all bikers equally subject to the dangers of car drivers. As with all such individualized, atomistic forms of libertarianism/anarchism, this assumes that the best strategy is to thread the needle in the most agile way possible as an individual rather than doing anything to change that system for others - or even help inform them of the real dangers or risks. Add to this keeping your kids from being vaccinated, buying only organic foods, etc.
In this regard, the two things the piece doesn't suggest - and it really is better to call it a piece rather than a study since it is more of a philosophical argument than an actually data driven piece - are the benefit to data legislation like this could provide and the other options from a more Law and Economics kind of perspective. On the latter, while they speculate that people might just stop riding a bike if they were "forced" to ride with a helmet, they don't actually include the most important aspect of the system they forsee: the actual coercive mechanisms that would be employed. If the law isn't enforced very stringently or if the fine was rather low, then it would likely be something the really hardcore adherents would disobey at will by simply including the cost of the fine into the cost of riding a bike (in Law and Economics, e.g. Coase, they would say that this shows the complete inability of the state to affect any changes in behaviour - probably true on the margins most of the time, but again this is based on the particular circumstances.) In any case, this is not included as a possibility and would likely be one of the predictable outcomes - maybe even one of the reasons that the statistical effects helmet laws in other countries appear to be so negligible.
On this basis, we might make another possible argument for the law: namely, that because the data is so fuzzy, we should mandate helmets for cyclists, strictly enforce it, and track it carefully in order to produce the best possible data on which to decide the right path for the future - whether as individuals making informed choices or states making laws. It would be best to do this in a variety of social, political, and cultural circumstances so as to find the right mix - possibly altering the laws around driving as well. In other words, we could agree to pass the law mandating helmets for a limited time as a sort of broad scale form of distributed research.
This would never happen, of course, because it sounds like some sort of Stalinist experiment to those who insist their individual liberty to do whatever the fuck they want should be the primary and eternal goal of all civilization, even if, as in this case, the temporary inconvenience could end up deciding things in favor of their side. If it was discovered, for instance, that riding without a helmet wasn't actually all that risky after all, it would ruin all the fun. It is better to ride that razor's edge between individual assertions of liberty no matter the risk, and the pretention of being more reasonable and informed about the ACTUAL risk than all the people who claim you are taking that risk. I'm sure there is some comparison in here to financial quants and hedge fund managers deriding regulation, but I can't quite articulate it.
Since this will already be my third post today, I'll just say thanks to Doug, Carrol (offlist) and John for the shout on the post yesterday. I wasn't fishing for recognition, just curious about what (or who) merits responses in these conversations. But in any case it's always nice to hear that it wasn't a technical problem, as it sometimes feels it must be (i.e. is anything I'm sending actually appearing on the list?)
best, Sean