Sorry, but this is a bad, dumb comment. Your point is valid generally, but not here.

What is the COST of wearing a helmet? $60 purchase and 5 seconds every time you ride. Essentially nothing.

Compare to, e.g. TSA, which has a cost of billions of dollars and millions of person-hours. Unlike helmets, which are known to actually prevent some injuries, TSA is also effectively useless at its intended goal.

It's hypocritical of you to not be wearing full body chain mail to protect yourself from bullets and stabbings.

There's more gunshots and stabbings than people injuring their head on bicycles.

You can buy a suit of chainmail for the same price as a modern bicycle.

Its minimal cost.

> It's hypocritical of you to not be wearing full body chain mail to protect yourself from bullets and stabbings.

In most countries, the risk of shootings or stabbings are orders of magnitude lower than having a fall or accident on a bike on the road with other types of vehicles.

In certain parts of the US, though? Yeah, wearing body armor would probably be a good idea. I think people just generally try to avoid going to those places as their strategy of risk avoidance, which negates the need for any body armor.

I bet if you looked up just about any region in the world shootings and stabbings have been way more frequently than bicycle head injuries.

to be absolutely safe you should wear both full body chainmail and a bicycle helmet.

>What is the COST of wearing a helmet? $60 purchase and 5 seconds every time you ride. Essentially nothing.

For me the main cost is having to carry around a bulky helmet when I'm off the bike and ugly indentations on my hair and forehead.

Unlikely in the average but catastrophic to the individuals who lose the bet. Often society has to pay for the consequence to the victim.

Which reminds me I need to get a helmet for my youngest, even though she's only a rider.

You should get them some full body Kevlar and chain mail as well. There are more shootings and stabbings than bicycle head injuries. Just to be safe.

Curious what sources you have.

Because several family members and I have experienced head injuries riding bicycles, none of us have been shot at or attacked with a knife. That said, I'm down for making all private gun possession illegal.

There's like 250,000 shootings and stabbings in the US per year estimated.

There's like 27000 bicycle head injuries in the US.

I'm surprised you haven't googled it.

Here's the head injury source. You can easily Google shooting and stabbings per year and add them together. https://www.nsc.org/safety-first-blog/bicycle-safety-statist...

Its pretty clear you should pick up some Kevlar and chain mail for your kids.

There may be some reporting issues with your data. For example how many helmets prevented would've-been-reported head injuries? How many injuries aren't reported? And how many hours on bicycle are there compared to constantly living around so many guns?

A natural experiment may require comparing similar communities with and with helmet laws.

Shootings and stabbings on the other had are difficult to not report. And can happen regardless of proximity to bicycles.

Ultimately let's do both: get helmets for kids and get rid of so many guns.

A minor fall on a bike that results in a blow to the head can kill you or give you major brain damage. I am not a social person and I know as in we would hug if we saw each other 2 people who had life altering brain damage not wearing a helmet.

If you fall on asphalt without a helmet, you can very easily get seriously injured

I used to be an EMT. There was one week when I went to two different calls that illustrated this perfectly. Both riders middle aged, both at low speed. One wearing a helmet hit a pothole and had minor facial injuries despite going over the handlebars. The other no helmet and out of practice fell sideways and the first thing to hit the kerb was her head. She's permanently disabled and living in a care facility.

Anecdotal fear inducing internet story.

Statistically 'in real life' extremely rare for this to happen.

> Statistically 'in real life' extremely rare for this to happen.

Just like most forms of harm; most of the time that you take some form of insurance against a negative event, it's not necessarily because of the likelihood of that event, but the sheer totality of the harm that will occur if that extremely rare event comes to pass.

Yeah. But the family of the rider probably wishes she wasn't a statistic.

You can become a statistic just by walking outside.

And this is why you always wear a helmet when walking or going for a jog?

Unless you're Usain Bolt, you probably ain't jogging or walking at bicycle speeds.

At bicycle speeds?

15-35 kmph for recreational usage. It's sprinting speeds for people who walk.

It’s very hard to fall on your head at 10 mph or greater when jogging

If you cycle a lot, you're almost guaranteed to crash at some point. Falling from walking or jogging is extremely unlikely. You also have much better chance of blocking the fall with your arms, as they're not on a handlebar, but rather already balancing your body.

Many walkers and joggers wear a lit up harness (or even bicycle lights) to improve their visibility while walking after dark in my area. So yes, some wear safety gear.

When did anyone fall off a walk or a jog?

Every single winter lots of people fall when walking or jogging.

When was the last time you've been outside?

How often do people fall off of bicycles?

The "tiny risk" and potentially large consequences is why people should choose to wear helmets, regardless of experience. You never quite know when an accident is going to happen and it is difficult to account for that. The big risks are easier to account for, to be alert and modify your behaviour accordingly.

I have seen experienced ice skaters go from not wearing a helmet to being fanatical about wearing one, simply because they had an accident and had to deal with the consequences. I have also seen experienced cyclists who would have likely lost their life if they weren't wearing a helmet.

As for the company in question, which (incidently) was insisting that employees not wear helmets, it sounds more like a decision based upon the perceptions of customers. If they were truly interested in hiring people who are safety conscious, they would hire people who are safety conscious rather than those who are willing to ride without a helmet. There are more than a few people who don't wear helmets who have an astronomically high tollerance of risk.

Out of all the people who are vehemently arguing that it is pure idiocy not to wear a helmet, how many of them wear a helmet when driving? I can pretty safely guess that the answer is a big fat zero.

Driving is high risk activity that can lead to severe head injuries. It is even easier to keep a helmet with your car than with your bike. The cost to risk profile here is extremely similar but the resultant behavior is quite different.

People rarely approach risks rationally and risk avoidance behavior is highly influenced by social acceptability.

During my lifetime of skiing, I have seen the shift from nobody wearing helmets to most people wearing them. The ski patrols worked hard to make helmet wearing first socially acceptable and then socially expected (at least in some groups.) The risks didn't changed, there was some rise in awareness, but the biggest change (from my perspective) is social.

This I see the vehement support for helmet wearing as predominantly cultural alignment enforcement rather than reasoned risk avoidance analysis.

Personally, I always wear a helmet skiing because it is more comfortable, plus I ski FAST sometimes. I rarely wear a helmet on a bicycle because I bike slow and strongly try to avoid situations where my safety is in the hands of other drivers. Instead I stick to mostly quiet residential streets, bike paths, or separated bike lines. The helmet has a much larger impact on my risk profile when skiing than biking because of my behaviors.

All that said, I don't think that the company should ban standard safety gear for their riders. Especially since they claim to have good incident tracking, they should be able to find and let go any riders who act recklessly with a helmet.

Is there even a need for a helmet in most motor vehicles? Many safety features are already incorporated into the vehicle and the vehicle itself must meet safety standards. Contrast that to bicycles, which are often sold without legally mandated safety features and it is very much possible to purchase a new bicycle which should be considered criminally unsafe.[1]

The only reason why we are asking these questions is because things that are legally required for automakers is left, at best, as a responsibility to the consumer when it comes to bicycles.

[1] To be specific, any department store should be regarded as a death trap prior to a knowledgeable person verifying that it has been assembled properly. Even then one has to be careful since the components are typically intended for very light use.

> Driving is high risk activity that can lead to severe head injuries. It is even easier to keep a helmet with your car than with your bike. The cost to risk profile here is extremely similar but the resultant behavior is quite different.

Just FTR, don't wear a helmet while driving a car. It will massively increase the strain on your spine in the case of a crash and your airbags are not built with helmets in mind. Additionally, car helmets are usually of the full-size kind and reduce your field of vision quite a bit. There's a reason helmets are not recommended for normal driving.

It’s political correctness gone mad!