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Bike Locally

I found the most telling — and really, the only actionable — bit of this whole piece in the New Scientist piece about a computer model on the pros/cons of mandatory cycle helmet laws came in the last line:

However de Jong, a native of bike-loving Holland, makes clear that he would not discourage people from wearing helmets. “I go to Holland and places like that, and I don’t wear a helmet,” he says. “I used to live in London, and I wore a helmet all the time.”

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This entry was posted on Monday, April 27th, 2009 at 11:14 am and is filed under Bicycles, Risk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Bike Locally”

  1. Dave Says:
    April 28th, 2009 at 7:06 am

    Exactly!

    Short trip up a residential street to run an errand: No helmet.

    Commute into Manhattan via the Manhattan Bridge: Helmet.

  2. David Hembrow Says:
    April 29th, 2009 at 2:03 am

    It’s the principle of subjective safety being demonstrated once again. I used to live in the UK and know exactly why people there wear helmets. Here in the Netherlands people do not.

    If you want people to feel that cycling is safe enough that they want to take part, it has to feel safe enough that they will do so without safety equipment. That’s how it is here, and the result is that more than four in ten journeys in this city are made by bike (rather more than are made by car).

  3. Grant Johnson, PE, PTOE Says:
    May 7th, 2009 at 4:13 am

    I used to ride a bike to work, rode along busy four lane boulevards that had a 4′ bike lane. But there were many hazards, and I recall the worst feeling of all was going 10-15 mph, and getting “buzzed” by a huge semi truck that is 60 feet long and passing you at 45 mph only 1-2′ away. It’s very unsettling. The thought of just how vulnerable you are is difficult to get out of your mind. In the end, I felt riding a motorcycle at the speed of traffic was much safer than the vulnerability of riding a bike and getting passed all the time, with only a foot or two of room for error for driver after driver. The risk was more than I could bear. It’s just dangerous! And I’m not sure if I ever got hit that a helmut would matter much, given the broken back, femurs, and neck.

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Traffic Tom Vanderbilt

How We Drive is the companion blog to Tom Vanderbilt’s New York Times bestselling book, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), published by Alfred A. Knopf in the U.S. and Canada, Penguin in the U.K, and in languages other than English by a number of other fine publishers worldwide.

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