I had a cycling accident where I misjudged how tight a corner was, ran off the path, high sided and head planted into a tree. I wasn't going fast, maybe 10mph, but clearly too fast for the corner. First injury in over 15 years of cycling. Nobody else involved, indeed, nobody else in earshot, let alone cars.

My friend was cycling up a hill on a cycle route and his handlebars fell apart. Not sure why, think it was metal fatigue - they split down the fork. He woke up on the floor with his helmet in tens of pieces and with no idea what happened.

Things can just go wrong quickly on two wheels, and the outcome is often smashing your head on something.

> it’s true that drivers are more aggressive towards helmet wearers

Citation, please?

> can't think of an accident where a helmet would help when I'm on the cargo bike.

Right hook.

There's this Ian Walker study: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00014...

It's a small sample size, so take with a pinch of salt.

What Ian Walker's study failed to do was measure the amount of traffic, let alone the oncoming traffic. As he did different parts of his data collection on different days and on different roads, this key measure which often affects how far a car is able to move out going past a cyclist is a very obvious parameter to take into account. Ian's data set has times of passes in it so it might be possible to crate a proxy for traffic density but I haven't attempted this. I think it's more valid to conclude this study has no credence than to draw any conclusion from it.

Refutation of the Walker study which "assesses the extent to which the sample size in the original analysis may have contributed to spurious results".

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3783373/

Response to the refutation: https://researchportal.bath.ac.uk/en/publications/bicycle-he...

Olivier and Walter re-analysed the same data in 2013 and claimed helmet wearing was not associated with close vehicle passing. Here we show how Olivier and Walter’s analysis addressed a subtly, but importantly, different question than Walker’s. Their conclusion was based on omitting information about variability in driver behaviour and instead dividing overtakes into two binary categories of ‘close’ and ‘not close’; we demonstrate that they did not justify or address the implications of this choice, did not have sufficient statistical power for their approach, and moreover show that slightly adjusting their definition of ‘close’ would reverse their conclusions. We then present a new analysis of the original dataset, measuring directly the extent to which drivers changed their behaviour in response to helmet wearing. This analysis confirms that drivers did, overall, get closer when the rider wore a helmet.

You can largely avoid right hooks by riding in the primary position/take the general purpose lane by default rather than riding towards the edge or in the bike lane.

“cyclists were given 8.5cm (3.3 inches) more clearance by cars if they were not wearing helmets.”

https://helmets.org/walkerstudy.htm

You know that the article you posted was about refuting this claim:

"After re-analysis of Walker's data, helmet wearing is not associated with close motor vehicle passing"

As discussed above: the "re-analysis" took an analog measurement, filtered it into a binary "close" or "not close" at an arbitrary distance threshold, and then patted themselves on the back when the found there was no difference.

Confirmation bias machine strikes again.

The distance from your head to the ground on a bike is sufficient to cause serious injury of you just fall off. Your individual risk is very low, because you don't fall of bikes often. But multiplied across millions in the population, it starts to make a difference.

the same argument might work for walking, but none is suggesting to have helmets while walking