Dmitry Tantsur
@thomasfuchs have you noticed that the argument holds equally well if you replace cyclists with pedestrians or car drivers?
The goal of the helmet debates is to scare people from cycling by shifting the responsibilities from poor infrastructure to the victims.
Dwight Silverman
@thomasfuchs Both things can be true.
Stuck Here
I can't imagine bicycling without a helmet. But I do get it that having a country built on flat land and with a crazy large portion of bike routes nowhere near cars that you'd have fewer accidents.
Did I mention how flat the Netherlands are? That's a big help to your safety and infrastructure.
Nate Vack 🍴
@thomasfuchs On an individual level though, wearing helmets is just so obvious. Anecdotes are not data and yet:
* I've had two crashes in my life that would have put my head at serious risk but for my helmet
* My friend's dad had a crash that would almost certainly have killed him without a helmet
* My coworker's brother had a crash without a helmet that left him with permanent brain damage
The last two crashes happened on good, separate bike infrastructure
Nate Vack 🍴
@thomasfuchs I mean you *can* reduce risk a lot with good, thoughtful infrastructure design. (Not nearly to zero, though!) And I can see the logic behind "at a population level, the health benefits of increasing cycling adoption outweigh the risk from crashes, so helmet mandates are counterproductive."
The whole "we want people to wear helmets but not make cycling seem dangerous or inconvenient" thing is a super hard line to walk and I'm not surprised the gov't didn't succeed
kiennah
@thomasfuchs @dsilverman I mean, in ~33 years of cycling in the Netherlands, I can’t recall encountering a significant pothole… (tree roots bumping up cycling paths are a different story) and I would say slipping on train tracks is a skill issue… (I never lived in a city with tram lines)
Slippery road did get me once, but I guess kept my head up while sliding? 😬
Seriously, I would say biking daily for decades, starting as a small child, including occasionally transporting odd-shaped luggage, combined with a chill pace and chill bike geometry does make the Dutch ‘magically’ better at riding a bike in a Dutch urban environment.
Does a helmet help when you fall? Probably. Is the risk of hitting your head experienced as insignificant by most Dutch cyclists outside sports cycling (road race, MTB, cross)? Also yes.
Thomas 🔭🕹️
@creepy_owlet@mastodon.online they also constantly trying to deflect, with weird arguments like "why don't pedestrians require helmets then???! huh???? CHECKMATE"
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