I oughta have my head examined

Cyclechic Ferrara

Today I want to talk about bicycle helmets. Brain buckets. Skid lids. Cranium catchers. This Sunday past I spent a bit of time riding around the neighborhood dialing in a newly installed pair of Gran Compe 610’s. I was basically just tooling around, stopping to adjust, tooling some more, etc. As the point was not explicitly to go for a ride and as my average speed was likely to be (and in fact was) not more than 10 miles per hour, I didn’t bother with my special clickity shoes and my special stretchy clothes and my special cranial protection.

I zigged and zagged through the neighborhood, wending my leisurely way through the restaurant district, stopping at the art supply store to pick up a paint pen (I’m planning on pinstriping the lugs on the Fuji) past the school where the farmers market sets up, and out past the neighborhood where the One Percenters live. The brakes were now perfectly adjusted, the bike was riding smoothly, the weather was fine, and I was in a great mood. Remembering that I had promised the Managing Partner that I’d do a few things around the house before day’s end, I decided to take the bike path home. Not my favorite way to get around, but it draws a straight line back to the neighborhood and provides a tunneled crossing of Wisconsin Avenue. 

So it was that I came to a stop by the Barnes & Noble, waiting to cross at the light behind the mommy with the stroller and the elderly ladies on their beach cruisers, when a guy on a MuurMart mountain bike crossing in the opposite direction decided to call out to me, “you ought to be wearing a helmet.” What a your-favorite-curse-word-here-wad. I have ridden thousands of miles per year for over a decade. I own several bikes and several helmets. I belong and contribute to several bicycle advocacy organizations. I have read every book about practical cycling penned in the last forty years. I download (and actually read!) lots of those wonky papers about transportation and actually write a blog that’s mostly about bikes and cycling. 

And this t-shirt wearing weekender is gonna tell me to wear a helmet! Feckin’ douche. And I’m sure he congratulated himself for conscientiously educating the guy on the “old fashioned” bike about the need to wear a helmet. I don’t mind that he wanted me to understand the value of bicycle safety. I mind that the dipsh*t feels comfortable playing the nanny without actually having the first idea about bicycle safety.

And Numbnuts’ attitude is quite common. Think about the last time you saw a headline about a cyclist getting run down by a car. Every such article is sure to note, “the cyclist was/wasn’t wearing a helmet.” What the hell does that have to do with the fact that a car ran down a cyclist? Does not wearing a helmet mean I deserve to be run down by a car? No, it does not. It is an irrelevant fact used to dismiss the rights of cyclists. Note that Nanny didn’t tell the mommy pushing the baby stroller across the street while juggling a cell phone and a Vanilla Frappumochaccino to wear a helmet. 

Many European cities have vastly higher modal share for bicycles, as the transportation weenies say, than anyplace in the US. And you will almost never see a single helmet in Amsterdam or Copenhagen. I’ve personally been to several Italian cities where the share of trips by bike hovers near 30%, and never saw a single helmet on any of the senior citizens riding their bikes. 

But surely, given the accepted dogma that helmets save lives, the streets of Ferrara and Lucca must be strewn with the corpses of the bici-victims, right? No. Why? Because Europeans are used to seeing bikes. They have invested in bicycling infrastructure and have made a concerted effort to get people out of the cars that destroy the quality of life in their cities and cause the deaths of thousands of people per year. In 2010, over 30,000 people died in the U.S. because of cars. In the same year 618 cyclists died. So who should be wearing helmets?

There is even reason to believe that forcing people to wear helmets discourages them from riding bikes at all. Places with mandatory helmet laws have notably low ridership levels. But if you don’t believe me perhaps you will believe the New York Times. And with the massive success of Washington, DC's Capital Bike Share and hopefully others like it in cities around the country, we should expect to see a lot more helmetless heads on our streets. And when we do maybe we'll realize that bicycling is a safe, healthy way to get around, not a life threatening activity for which we need body armor. And maybe we'll start designing our communities on a human scale instead of being beholden to the mighty automobile, and then start holding cars responsible for sharing the road with cyclists and pedestrians.

Well, anyway, I’m not going to change anything here. As far as I’m concerned, if you want to wear a helmet, great. Strap one on. I usually do. But if you see a grown up tax-paying citizen riding his bike around town without a helmet, why don’t you just keep your righteousness to yourself. Go ahead and feel superior. Just keep that warm feeling inside. It might just be the case that other people are able to make informed choices for themselves without the benefit of your superhuman concern for our well being. 

Further Reading

http://chasingmailboxes.com/2012/10/10/you-wear-a-helmet-dont-you/

http://bicyclesafe.com/helmets.html