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Chris Boardman at the Get Britain Cycling InquiryChris Boardman: "Helmets not even in top 10 of things that keep cycling safe"
British Cycling policy advisor Chris Boardman says it’s time for the cycling community to put the debate about mandatory cycle helmets to bed and get across the message that helmet use is one of the least important cycling safety measures.
Even talking about making helmets mandatory “massively puts people off” cycling, Boardman said, and likened the culture of helmet use among keen cyclists to people wearing body armour because they have got used to being shot at.
Talking to road.cc at the London Bike Show, Boardman said, “I think the helmet issue is a massive red herring. It’s not even in the top 10 of things you need to do to keep cycling safe or more widely, save the most lives.”
You’re being shot at, put on body armour
Boardman returned to an analogy he has made before, and which even he admits is a bit melodramatic, though it gets the point across
“It’s a bit like saying ‘people are sniping at you going down this street, so put some body armour on,’” he said.
Government encouragement to wear helmets was therefore “a big campaign to get people to wear body armour, by the people who should be stopping the shooting.”
Widespread use of helmets, he said, sends the wrong message.
“Once you see somebody wearing body armour, even if there’s no shooting, you think ‘Christ I’m not going down there if they’re wearing body armour to go down that street.’ It scares people off.”
There’s a better solution to the problem of cycle safety, Boardman said. In the Netherlands, just 0.8 percent of cyclists wear helmets yet the Dutch have the lowest rate of cycling head injury, thanks to segregated cycling infrastructure. Thirty percent of journeys in the Netherlands are made by bike, he said, and 50 percent of children’s journey to school.
”The best way to deal with [the head injury issue] is what the Dutch have done,” he said. “Where you have the Highest rate of helmet use, you also have the highest rate of head injury: us and the US.”
Yet there’s also an almost-fanatical, knee-jerk devotion to helmet use among enthusiast and sporting cyclists.
Boardman said: “People who are wearing body armour get used to being shot at, when it’s the getting shot at that’s the problem.”
A distraction
Talking about helmets had become a time-consuming distraction, he said. “We’ve got to tackle the helmet debate head on because it’s so annoying,” he said. “It gets a disproportionate amount of coverage. When you have three minutes and someone asks ‘Do you wear a helmet’ you know the vast majority of your time when you could be talking about stuff that will make a difference, is gone.”
He said the focus on helmets had made cycling seem more dangerous than it really is.
“We’ve gone away from the facts,” he said. “We’ve gone to anecdotes. It’s like shark attacks - more people are killed building sandcastles than are killed by sharks. It’s just ludicrous that the facts aren’t matching up with the actions because the press focus, naturally, on the news stories, and [the notion that cycling is dangerous] becomes the norm, and it isn’t the norm.
“You can ride a thousand times round the planet for each cycling death. You are safer than gardening.”
Cycling’s image
Like many cycling advocates, Boardman wants to see cycling presented as a normal, everyday activity.
“I saw two people riding down the hill to my village. One person coming down the hill to go for the train in high-viz, helmet on.
“A few moments later another guy came down, in shirt sleeves, with a leather bag on his back, just riding his bike to the station.
“Which one of those makes me want to [ride]?”
John has been writing about bikes and cycling for over 30 years since discovering that people were mug enough to pay him for it rather than expecting him to do an honest day's work.
He was heavily involved in the mountain bike boom of the late 1980s as a racer, team manager and race promoter, and that led to writing for Mountain Biking UK magazine shortly after its inception. He got the gig by phoning up the editor and telling him the magazine was rubbish and he could do better. Rather than telling him to get lost, MBUK editor Tym Manley called John’s bluff and the rest is history.
Since then he has worked on MTB Pro magazine and was editor of Maximum Mountain Bike and Australian Mountain Bike magazines, before switching to the web in 2000 to work for CyclingNews.com. Along with road.cc founder Tony Farrelly, John was on the launch team for BikeRadar.com and subsequently became editor in chief of Future Publishing’s group of cycling magazines and websites, including Cycling Plus, MBUK, What Mountain Bike and Procycling.
John has also written for Cyclist magazine, edited the BikeMagic website and was founding editor of TotalWomensCycling.com before handing over to someone far more representative of the site's main audience.
He joined road.cc in 2013. He lives in Cambridge where the lack of hills is more than made up for by the headwinds.
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198 comments
“We’ve gone away from the facts,” he said. “We’ve gone to anecdotes.
But all of the counter arguments are themselves anecdotes.
“Where you have the Highest rate of helmet use, you also have the highest rate of head injury: us and the US.”
That is a logical fallacy (deductive or logical)
e.g.
1. All birds have beaks
2. all beaked animals are birds (which is wrongly deduced (think octopus)).
The implication is because we have a higher rate of helmet use in the UK & US is that we have more accidents, that is a massive logical faux pas.
Going back, if you were to take up the body armour gambit, do you see UN peacekeepers strolling around without body armour as the politicians try to thrash out a lasting peace in a war torn area - nope they increase their protection towards themselves with body armour until it is safe not to....
I would love to feel i did not need to go out without a crash helmet on, but i do not with the complete disrespect motorists show to cyclists in the UK. Cycling in France was a pleasure by comparison to metropolitan London and but for the fact i was in an organised sponsored ride whose insurance required the wearing of helmets, i would have felt safe enough not to need one.
If you read the posts you will find noone made that deduction. The claim has never been that the high rate of helmet wearing or compulsion causes dangerous road conditions for cyclists.
The obvious deduction is that helmets have not made cycling in NZ, Oz or USA as safe as N or Dk. By a long long way.
A more tenuous conclusion is that helmet laws and wearing are a reaction to dangerous road conditions, and a reaction which does not work as well as whatever it is that makes some countries much safer.
I suspect (not a deduction) that helmets are a diversion or decoy which helps distract from measures which would work, As Boardman said.
Is more a counterpoint to this asserted premise above that all birds have beaks: "in fact in these countries you see a large number of beakless birds".
How brilliant; he says stop debating the issue ... and you all use this as an excuse to ...
Make your own choice about whether you want to wear one and do that. Then keep your mouth shut and stop trying to convince others that you have made the correct decision and them the wrong one.
And yes, I am aware of the irony of deriding the debates on forums by using a forum.
The easiest way for the authorities to ensure nothing gets done is to give Mr Boardman an official position.
Not wearing a helmet saved my life today. I wasn't wearing one, and I'm alive.
Not shagging your mum today saved my life. Won't stop me trying it tomorrow.
Same logic.
I am on the list of "helmet saved my life" people, so I agree that there should be no further discussion about helmet use. It should be the law. No debate from me on that much.
Car insurance increases driver carelessness, but it is still the law to have it. Drunk driving isn't in the top-10 causes of car accidents, but again, it is illegal.
And to stick with the drunk driving example as a much better example than his shooting analogy. It is easy to measure, easy to enforce, and it can be fixed relatively simply by peer pressure.
The rest of his top-10 are all multi-million pound fixes in road or vehicle design, or practically impossible like changing driver culture.
PS Anyone put off riding a bike by being told to wear a helmet was actively looking for an excuse not to ride.
Yes, demanding that cyclists wear helmets is indeed easier than fixing our roads, or building cycle routes, or persuading people to drive less and more carefully. Just a shame there's bugger all evidence that it works.
{{citation needed}}.
There are vastly more people, proportionally, who claim that helmets saved their lives, than people who are seriously injured while riding unhelmeted.
So either the helmets make you very very much more likely to crash, or people are engaging in perfectly normal human behaviour, congratulating themselves on how smart they are and reinforcing their own belief.
After all, it's not that long since people genuinely credited St. Christopher for a safe journey.
One thing is certain: the actual figure from real cyclist populations steadfastly refuses to show any correlation between helmet wearing rates and head injury rates. It's almost as if they are only specified for the equivalent of a simple fall from a stationary or slow moving bike, i.e. roughly equivalent to falling over (i.e. the very case for which our skulls evolved).
Oh, wait, they are.
No such list exists. HTH.
Your use of capitals and american terms to signal the end of a sentence convinces me.
UNTIL WE HAVE SEGREGATED ROADS LIKE HOLLAND (ie never!) THEN HELMETS MUST BE WORN
I have fallen & broken 3-4 helmets in recent years, but NOT BROKEN MY SKULL YET
Cav has fallen & broken several helmets BUT NOT BROKEN HIS SKULL YET!
IF YOU WANT TO SMASH your skull instead of a cheap replacement plastic 'head thing' go ahead, be foolish, and don't wear one - but on the current dangerous UK roads (Cars and appaling 'third world' pot holes etc) it makes sense to wear one.....PERIOD
Clive
Fine, wear a helmet, no one is stopping you. But the shouting isn't useful, really.
By the way, I've also fallen of a few times in 40 years of cycling - 0 broken skulls and 0 broken helmets. Not convinced this proves anything at all, but my anecdote is surely as good as yours.
"Period"? Are you an American? I see you call yourself "septic".
Yes, isn't it amazing how even when helmets clearly fail, people still credit them with saving their life? Skulls are rather tougher than helmets. I have had three bike crashes that left me unconscious. Have a guess how many of these happened while I was wearing a helmet? Clue: greater than zero, less than three.
When you crash while wearing one, the A&E doctor tells you it saved your life. When you crash while not wearing one, the A&E doctor tells you that you're lucky to be alive and should wear a helmet in future.
And that, as far as I can tell, is the sum total of the difference in outcomes between helmeted and unhelmeted crashes!
Is Dutch tarmac softer than ours?
Are their segregated roads made of some magical substance?
By your logic :-
Fall off in on a segregated road in Holland without a helmet you'll be alright.
Fall off on a British road without a helmet you will definitely die.
As usual, Chris Boardman is absolutely correct in trying to get debate back to what it should be about, and correct at pointing out what a massive red herring helmets are.
Unfortunately, as some comments above indicate, being sensible is not what helmet advocacy is about. There needs to be a more forceful reference to the evidence to show what the problems of helmet advocacy, let alone compulsion, can be. I have a stab here: http://rdrf.org.uk/2013/12/27/the-effects-of-new-zealands-cycle-helmet-l...
can we see the video of your interview with CB?
Well...I'd have died 3 days before Christmas if I didn't have a helmet on...try telling me they're a bad idea.
That is what is known within scientific circles as "anecdotal evidence" and is of very little value.
You may as well have said, "Helmets are a good idea because a bloke down the pub said!".
I'm glad you were wearing a helmet and it saved you from injury. I wear a helmet and always will, and I make my kids wear them as well. If others chose not to though, that's their business as far as i am concerned.
However, Chris doesn't say they are a bad idea, which is what you suggest. He just says that they aren't as important as more fundamental improvements to cycling infrastructure and that they have assumed an entirely disproportionate significance to the cycling safety debate.
Actually in many of his debates he does say they are a bad idea. He quotes statistics from other road systems and cultures where they have less accidents and no helmets as being proof that helmets 'cause' accidents. He claims that drivers treat helmeted riders differently and consequently take less care.
And on the subject of not caring about whether other cyclists wear helmets. What if you are the driver that he rides in front of, or the first person on the scene that has to give first aid? Would you rather deal with a mild concussion and some broken bones, a crushed skull or a corpse?
My colleague is off work long-term sick because she slipped and bumped her head at the office party. If only she'd been wearing a helmet...
Seriously though, you and I have made the choice to wear helmets. However, I reserve the right to NOT be criminalised should I choose not to one day for whatever reason.
The same probably goes for me last year, but that's not the debate and not what Boardman seems to be saying - like a few other people round here it seems I wear a helmet but am against making it mandatory.
Well... you don't actually know that. And he isn't trying to stop you, or anyone else, wearing a helmet. He's simply pointing out the rather obvious facts that; first, there are vastly more important safety gains to be had than can be made by compelling helmet use; and second, focusing on the danger of cycling does nothing to get people out of cars and on to bikes.
Prove the helmet saved your life.
you crashed, you were wearing a helmet, those are definites.
Now did the helmet hinder, help, make a difference no one knows, it may have prevented a few scrapes but that is about all you can say.
I crashed a few weeks back whilst wearing a helmet landed on my face, glasses cut into my cheek. S*** happens.
If you want to prove the helmet saved your life i suggest you repeat the experiment this time without a helmet on, remember you must not adjust your riding style or speed, you must arrange for all parties to be exactly the same, same time of day, location of clouds etc.
In science you repeat experiments before you draw a conclusion.
* note the bit where he says countries with higher helmet wearing levels also have higher levels of head trauma. Causation or coincidence? Does making a helmet mean you are more likely to get a head injury than not wearing a helmet.....
And this is the same nonsense abuse of "science" that Boardman uses to make his case. The road designs, cultures, laws etc are all different. Therefore comparing helmet use to other countries is meaningless. It is like saying that speaking german makes you immune to head injuries because german-speaking cyclists have less accidents.
If you want to compare similar samples try pro-riders over time. Same conditions, same roads, same speeds, same weather. Many less head injuries in the last decade.
Do you have a reference for this? I have heard the reverse.
Here's a report http://www.ctvnews.ca/health/health-headlines/no-evidence-cycle-helmet-l... of a study done in Canada by an academic who clearly expected to find evidence of an effect of compulsion, but failed and now admits it is complexer than that. Sorry it's not a direct link to the paper, but I'm off out on the cross bike (with hat, because I'm going offroad, where they probably are useful).
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