The question of whether Dale was wearing a helmet or not pales in the face of the much larger question - were all the riders putting themselves at great risk because they felt they were protected by their helmets?

Try this. Go for a ride wearing a helmet. Then, do the same ride without a helmet. Did you ride more cautiously without the helmet? Is your faith in a helmet so strong that you ride with less caution when you’re wearing one? You might as well be clutching Dumbo’s feather.

The Dale Stetina incident begs the question - how much safety does a bicycle helmet truly afford? Risk compensation notwithstanding, how much protection does an 8-ounce piece of polystyrene provide? Sure, a helmet will diminish trauma within a low-velocity range of incidents (although they do a surprisingly poor job of mitigating concussions), but beyond that, people start whistling past the graveyard. Example: you crash head-first at 20 mph into an on-coming truck that’s travelling at 40 mph. Your closing speed is 60 mph. Will a bit of sculpted foam make any difference? Sadly, no. But, you reason, accidents like that are rare and, if you ride, it’s a risk you accept. The question is, does risk compensation cause you to ride less cautiously when wearing a helmet and, if so, does that reduced caution outweigh any additional safety a helmet might otherwise afford? Does wearing helmets actually increase the frequency of accidents?

In America, you’re more likely to die from a bullet than from a bicycling-related head injury. Do you put on a bullet-proof vest every morning? If not, why not? Similarly, you’re more likely to sustain a fatal head injury by falling from a ladder than from a cycling-related head injury. Do you wear a helmet when you climb a ladder? No, because you’re careful when you climb a ladder and you assume that the risk of falling from the ladder is sufficiently low that specific head protection is unnecessarily over-cautious. Why don’t we make the same consideration with cycling?

If you torture statistics long enough, you can get them to say anything. Certainly the bullet-proof vest argument can be parsed. Likewise the force of any helmet safety argument gets diminished once you eliminate night-time riding without lights, inexperienced riders, traffic signal violators, the inebriated, and Strava record attempts with ear buds. But my object isn’t to use statistics to prove a point. Rather, I want to challenge the pervasive American belief that every rider should ride with a helmet, on every ride because…“helmets keep you safe”.

A recent article in Bicycling magazine entitled “Senseless” (with no apparent irony) reviewed the state of bicycle helmet art with the conclusion that current bicycle helmets do almost nothing to prevent concussions. Huh? Bicycling has tirelessly promoted helmets for the past 30 years to the ceaseless drumbeat of “Always wear a helmet. Helmets keep you safe.” Now, suddenly, they discover that’s not exactly the case. 

But surely, you say, wearing a helmet is a small price to pay, even if the protection it offers is limited. Maybe. But “it’s a small price to pay” is a knee-jerk justification too often used without nuance or consideration and unanticipated consequences often result. What if that “small price” is bigger than it seems?

What if helmet use actually makes cycling more dangerous? What if, by promising “safety”, helmeted cyclists ride more aggressively and with less caution than they would if they weren’t wearing helmets? It’s an interesting and, I believe, a valid question.

As much as we might like to believe otherwise, Americans live in a culture of fear. And fear is lucrative. If you can make people afraid of something (e.g., gluten, cholesterol, body odor, terrorists) you can sell them a “solution”. And they’ll stand in line, ready to pay because, whatever the price, “it’s a small price to pay” for the promised security. It doesn’t matter if there’s no rational basis for the product or if the problem is wildly inflated or if the “solution” is ineffective or worse than the problem. Once people are afraid, they are easily led and ready to buy anything that supposedly makes them safe. Fear sells massive SUVs to soccer moms. It sells insurance. It sells magazines. It sells cosmetics. It sells wars. And it sells bicycle helmets.

U.S. bicycle shops sell about two million helmets every year. Mass market retailers sell another five million or so more. This market barely existed 30 years ago. Somehow Americans managed to live without bicycle helmets or even think about them until the early 1980’s. Then, bicycling began to be marketed as “dangerous” and helmets were the solution.

Although solid numbers are hard to come by, the total U.S. bicycle helmet market is something on the order of $500 million per year. It’s a nice business, driven by fear. A helmet is an easy add-on sale made with the sale of any new bike. And it’s doubly attractive if it generates goodwill while upping the bottom-line. After all, $100 is “a small price to pay” for the security of knowing that you’ll be “safe” on your new bike.

But helmets don’t “keep you safe”. However, there’s little money to be made in the promotion of safe cycling and there’s big money in a fear-driven market for bicycle helmets. Helmet advertising supports editorial reviews and helmet tests that presuppose everyone needs a helmet. Advertising and editorial coverage create a need that’s filled by bicycle retailers who love the additional revenue stream helmets bring. Millions and millions of helmets pour into the United States each year, even though, if you’re riding responsibly, the actual risk of head injury is quite low and evidence of helmet efficacy is weak.

Helmets are a religion that feeds on itself. The message “helmets keep you safe” has been has been told so many times that many Americans accept it as gospel truth. The dogma, in a nutshell, is this: They make helmets for bicycling because bicycling is dangerous. Since it’s dangerous, you should never ride without a helmet.  As with any religion, people don’t like to have their beliefs challenged. But I will. While it’s comforting to believe that wrapping your head in foam will keep you safe, maybe (forgive me) you’re burying your head in the sand.

I’m not suggesting a vast conspiracy exists to defraud American cyclists by selling helmets they don’t need. I’m sure most bicycle retailers, writers, and manufacturers truly believe they are making bicycling safer, even if they are coincidentally creating a climate of fear around bicycling and profiting by it. But, what if there’s a better alternative to flooding the market every year with millions of imported polystyrene magic hats? What if that annual $500 million went to making cycling safer? What if cycling were so safe that the risk of crashing was negligible?

In the Netherlands, millions of people commute everyday by bicycle without helmets. Less than 1% of Dutch cyclists wear helmets, yet the Netherlands is the safest country in the world for cycling! How is that possible? If bicycling is so dangerous, how do all these millions of Dutch people manage to ride safely every day without helmets?

Dutch municipal and national governments rightly recognize cycling as a congestion-relieving transportation mode that offers the additional attractive merits of being environmentally benign and healthy to boot. And they support it accordingly, pouring millions into infrastructure to encourage cycling and make it both easier and safer to travel by bike. Example: the Hovenring in Eindhoven, Netherlands is a floating suspension deck that allows cyclists to cross over a busy highway. This €20 million cycling infrastructure show piece is only one of the numerous projects the Dutch have taken to enhance cycling safety.

But it’s not just Dutch cycling infrastructure that makes it so safe. The primary reason it’s so safe to ride a bike is numbers – everyone rides and there is strength in numbers. In the Netherlands, there are more bikes than people, and most Dutch ride their bike every day. As numerous studies have shown, cycling safety increases as the number of cyclists on the road increases. As more people ride, bicycling becomes a safer option, so more people ride. And then it becomes even safer, so even more people ride. It’s a virtuous circle in which every additional cyclist makes the community safer for cycling.

Defenders of helmets will immediately object that the Netherlands is different from the U.S., that they have a culture of cycling, that motorists are more aware of the rights of cyclists, etc., etc., but in the end, I think it's a weak defense of the status quo. Saying “we can’t do what they do” ensures that we won’t. We will never achieve the level of comfort and security that exists in the Netherlands as long as we continue to focus our attention and spend our money on helmets rather than working actively to make cycling safer in our communities. The best and fastest way to make cycling safer in America is to get more cyclists on the road. We need to follow the Dutch model - it’s not dangerous, come out and ride!

Instead of focusing so myopically on a safety product of limited value, the goal should be doing things that’ll make cycling safer. Rather than spend $500 million dollars a year on millions of foam helmets, and then repeating it year after year, imagine if that money were spent each year on cycling infrastructure, on bike to work programs, on advertising, or on cycling instruction. Half a billion dollars every year would go a long way toward making cycling safer, which would mean more people would ride, which would make it safer, so more people would ride, which would make it safer, etc.

The biggest problem with helmets is they discourage cycling. The message it sends to potential cyclists is that cycling is so dangerous nobody should ever ride without a helmet. Is this really the message we want to send? If you’re not already a cyclist, why would you ever want to take up something so dangerous?  Why take the risk? Why not drive instead? What responsible mother would ever allow her child to ride a bike to school when it’s such a dangerous activity?

But cycling is not dangerous. And, before 1980, almost nobody even considered wearing a helmet. For decades, millions of American kids rode their bikes to school every day without helmets. And millions of adult Americans rode without helmets. And thousands of amateur and professional racers rode without helmets. Yet there was never any cycling-related head injury crisis. Zero. It wasn’t even an issue. It didn’t become an issue until there was money to be made selling safety”.

Rather than focus on the supposed “danger” of cycling and the “need” to protect your head (however low the risk and however limited that protection may be) why not proactively encourage cycling?

Ride like you’d ride without a helmet. Maybe even dare to do it. The best and fastest way to make cycling safer in America is to get more people riding bikes and riding them responsibly. Wrapping yourself in body armor provides less protection than you’d like to believe, especially if your belief is so strong that you take risks you wouldn’t otherwise take. Making cycling seem more dangerous than it really is supresses growth. And that’s why I’m real iffy about the conventional wisdom. Maybe it’s not a small price to pay. Maybe it’s the reverse.

Think twice about that helmet, and definitely lose the ear buds.

Tom Petrie

Tom Petrie is a lifetime cyclist, a daily bicycle commuter, and owner of www.CantitoeRoad.com  a bicycle parts e-commerce company..

Tel: 1.800.422.2104

email: Tom.Petrie@CantitoeRoad.com