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The notion of the helmet’s importance has been so internalized that we barely bat an eye at programs like New York City DOT’s free helmet distribution. But a good-faith debate in fact exists in the international cycling community about how important helmets really are and whether mandatory helmet laws keep riders safe.

Toronto city councillor Michael Walker believes helmets are crucial to preventing head injuries, so he’s proposing a mandatory helmet law not just for children (as is the custom in most American states), but for all riders. His proposal’s logic feels intuitive; after all, most places require their use on motorcycles and scooters just as we insist that drivers wear seat belts, so why shouldn’t cyclists have to sport protective wear as well?

Walker’s proposal certainly has precedent, most notably in Western Australia, which passed comprehensive helmet laws nearly two decades ago. But the results were disastrous. According to the Bicycle Helmet Research Foundation, immediately after the law went into effect, the state of Victoria, where cycling rates had been increasing dramatically over the previous 15 years, saw a 36 percent decrease in ridership. For every one teenager who began to wear a helmet, more than 10 others abandoned their bicycles. While 80 percent of Western Australian children walked or biked to school in 1977, that rate has plummeted to a measly 5 percent in 2009.

What’s more, when the Victoria helmet law took such a hefty chunk out of cycling rates, it ended up paradoxically decreasing cyclist safety. This is because one of the biggest determining factors of bicycle safety is not protective wear, but the number of other cyclists out on the road. In 2003 health consultant Peter Jacobsen published a widely read report that tracked this trend across such disparate locales as California, Denmark and the U.K. Even when cities within the same country or state were compared, the results bore out this fact.

One of the primary reasons helmet laws depress ridership is that they seem to imply that cycling is a dangerous activity. But this is not the case. According to a study published in 2006 by the British Medical Journal, cycling is not significantly more dangerous than either walking or driving. The study estimates that on average it takes 8,000 years of normal cycling to produce a serious head injury, and it takes 22,000 years to produce one death. 

New York City conducted a 10-year study that examined its bicycle fatality rate. In that time only one death occurred while the cyclist was riding within a marked bicycle lane, while 84 percent of bicycle crashes occurred when the cyclist had to cross into a vehicular path.”

This perceived risk is extremely important to the average citizen when considering whether to bike or drive to the store. Sustainable transportation advocacy group Transportation Alternatives has strongly opposed mandatory helmet laws in New York City on multiple occasions for just this reason. Their spokesperson Wiley Norvell explains how it’s an issue when cycling morphs from a “spontaneous activity, as commonplace as going for a walk,” into something seen as “more cumbersome, less safe.”

“The problem with that, with anything that decreases cycling rates,” Norvell says, “is that it goes against this phenomenon of safety in numbers.” He says that when you triple the cycling rate, you halve the crash rate.

A reduction in cycling rates also means a reduction in the number of people who are able to enjoy the powerful health benefits of moderate cycling, an effective way to combat obesity, heart disease and diabetes. The CTC, the U.K.’s national cyclists’ organization, has argued that one can test whether the imposition of helmet laws really leads to an overall public health benefit by comparing life-years gained through cycling to life-years saved by helmets. They found that the benefits outweigh the risks by a ratio of 20-1. They calculated that the helmet laws in Victoria actually did more harm than good. With this data in hand, the CTC lobbied against a measure that came up before the British Parliament a few years back that would have required all children to wear helmets, and the bill was soundly defeated. Earlier this year the Danish Parliament struck down a proposed child helmet law using the same logic.

Instead of trying to ameliorate the extent of a bicycle injury, we should be putting our efforts into preventing the injury from happening in the first place. New York City conducted a 10-year study that examined its bicycle fatality rates. In that time only one death occurred while the cyclist was riding within a marked bicycle lane, while 84 percent of bicycle crashes occurred when the cyclist had to cross into a vehicular path. This shows that protected lanes and other safety improvements work, even here in America, and we should be doing our best to ensure that every potential cyclist has access to safe cycling conditions. It seems we should all share at least a little of the stated “skepticism about the wisdom of promoting or legislating helmet use” of Mikael Colville-Anderson, founder of the bicycle advocacy blog Copenhagenize.com. As he says, “We can either promote cycling or we can promote helmets. We cannot do both.”

 

This article appeared in the Winter 2009 issue of Next American City magazine. SUBSCRIBE NOW!