My opinion on this might also be heavily and incorrectly influenced by popular media sprinkled with a few factual statistics that reinforce the bias.
With more power comes more responsibility, put into practice.
Compare this with New York City where if you negligently kill someone with your car, the police won't even issue a ticket unless you're drunk. Then comes the civil lawsuit in which the surviving family will probably settle for your car insurance policy limits (e.g. $100,000, far lower than German limits that are in the millions of Euros).
Note that younger children still usually wear a helmet, since they are more likely to have an accident on their own (i.e. falling over).
You can get a neverending stream of OUIs and keep your license after paying fines in most cases. We often joke that the best way to get away with murder is to run someone down and tell the judge that "they came out of nowhere".
But lord help you if you get caught walking down the street with a joint in your bag.
What is that based on? People I know who have had DUIs had a lot of trouble and cost, their driving was highly restricted, and a second DUI would have stopped them from driving and maybe put them in jail (IIRC).
https://www.grievelaw.com/WisconsinOWI/Laws/Record
That article contains a common trope: an official expressing shock and surprise at the offender’s record and uncertainty as to how they still had a license.
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2013/06/14/raquel-nelson-finally...
Shoplifting and really any property crime that doesn't result in imminent grave harm can be safely considered "benign". Ditto for victimless crimes like drug possession.
What’s missing in US laws vs Netherlands?
If you are convicted of vehicular manslaughter, you are very likely going to serve time.
However, if you hit and kill and cyclist in the US, you are not likely to be charged with vehicular manslaughter, so long as you were sober and weren’t actively trying to hit them.
Whatever laws are on the books are virtually never actually enforced against motorists, because motorism (and disdain/resentment against cyclists) is deeply embedded in the culture.
The default reaction of the median American (or at least, the median law enforcer) to any accident involving a motorist and a cyclist, regardless of actual fault, is “fucking bikers always breaking laws, running red lights and stop signs, if they want to take our lanes and slow us down, why don’t they think they have to follow rules like a REAL vehicle,” etc.
A joke I heard a few times was "If a bike fell out of the air onto a parked car, the car owner is going to court."
Certainly the perception is that drivers don’t face jail time in such a situation.
No. It will be slap on the wrist time if there are any consequences at all. All it requires is a driver to lie about some mitigating cause they weren't responsible for.
Instead, it is focused on make people feel as afraid of biking as possible. Literally all these debates are focused on making people afraid no matter of what conditions, speed. Whether you go mountain bike competition or whether you are 50 years old manager slowly commuting in skirt and business hairstyle.
- more helmet wearing in less cycling-friendly cities like Rotterdam which, IIRC, is an example of such a place in the Netherlands
- more helmet wearing (in the sense that the ratio between Dutch helmet wearing and helmet wearing in other Western European countries is higher) at points in the past when bicycle infrastructure was less protected. Though this is confounded by lots of things.
i bet the more useful metrics are length of trip, average speed of the cars around you, and if you need to cross stop signs/intersections. dutch bike trips are often very short and the speed limits are low. you do not share the road with 35mph+ traffic as is common in america. intersections are the place where people get hurt on bikes the most and it’s more likely in american biking you will cross them. this one is where the separate infrastructure really comes in to play
Except for the time on a quiet suburban street when my drivetrain inexplicably locked up (never figured out what actually happened) and threw me over the handlebars, or the time when there wasn't much traffic around but there was some slippery garbage truck sludge exudate that I didn't see, which I wiped out on. My helmet saved me in both of those situations too.
It turns out that shit happens in general no matter who or where you are, and that dressing for safety actually does keep you safe. An inflated sense of ability to protect oneself does not amount to protection in the event of a crash.
And yes I use bike fairly often. I know multiple people who use bike fairly often. The only people actually hitting protective gear that often are the ones doing mountain biking. (Which seems to be genuinly dangerous even with the gear.)
You T-bone a car.
It helps.
Nonetheless I recommend to always wear gloves when riding a bike. They weigh nothing, fit in every bag/pocket and if you ever crash you'll be glad you wore them. Hands are very likely to get injured in an accident and it's not fun to not use them for a couple of days.
https://www.fietsersbond.nl/de-fiets/accessoires/fietshelmen...
https://www-fietsersbond-nl.translate.goog/de-fiets/accessoi...
I live here and I'll say that almost all bicycle delivery drivers where helmets in NL. Lost of riders wear helmets here, but I agree that most people just riding to work or going shopping do not.
I will also note that probably the largest bicycle delivery service in NL has helmets for sale for its riders.
I think people most on the thread understand that there are negative consequences to mandates. The question is about whether you as a rational individual should choose to wear one.
I think the answer to that is an irrefutable yes, if you want to reduce your risk of catastrophic head injury. But that doesn’t mean it should be mandated. We take calculated risks all the time, and the law can’t know all the variables and circumstances for each person at each moment. The mandate is ineffective because the most important safety factor for bicycles is frequency of cycling — the more bikes there are on the road, the more everyone is aware of them. But if you still had all those cyclists and put helmets on them, they would be slightly safer.
That isn't to say that a policy of requiring helmets is good on net (because people may ride less), but in any accident that you hit your head, you would greatly benefit from wean a helmet.
Keeping in mind that American drivers aren't used to cyclists, it wasn't that bad in my (minimal) experience. But, of course, bikes are a little more prevalent there so that this experience won't stretch too far land inwards.
It's nothing like riding a bike in the U. S.
The response here are hilarious, like "they also have better infrastructure" - wow, you are soo close to getting it!
1. The road infra is entirely structured around making it safer for cyclists in NE
2. They don't BAN the use of helmets. That study is NOT a justification to BAN them.
3. No one is suggesting that they be mandated either.