> If you want protection from injury on your bicycle, you are better off with a motorcycle helmet than a bicycle helmet, end of story.

Remember that protection is a balancing act. You are reducing the already low chance of catastrophic injury. However, in exchange for that, you are increasing your weight, drag, reducing your ventilation, giving yourself helmet hair, increasing the sweat your head is bathed in at the end of the ride, etc. Tossing a motorcycle helmet in may reduce your risk of injury even further, but remember, catastrophic crashes are relatively rare, they can kill you in many other ways than simple head injury, and a motorcycle helmet is way too heavy, hot, and unventilated for riding a bike, as well as restricting your vision and hearing and thus probably making it more likely for you to be involved in a crash. I would be very surprised if motorcycle helmets actually made you safer once you took all of this, as well as the effect of suppressing your desire to ride due to the discomfort and inconvenience (thus losing the benefits of the exercise it provides), into account.

"Bike helmets solve the cyclist protection problem for a small subset of crashes."

Bike helmets reduce the risk of injury in virtually all crashes that an improved helmet would reduce it. They simply don't reduce it as much as an improved helmet would. I don't stress too much about biking with a conventional helmet. Mine is a few years old and I'd like to replace it with a MIPS helmet when they are available, but as it is with a conventional bike helmet, my concerns with biking are:

1. Getting run over by a bus, in which case the helmet is quite moot.

2. Crashing and hurting myself, which with a helmet is unlikely to kill me, but may result in trying to stuff my bike in the back of my wife's car while dripping blood.

The Hovding is something I would never in a million years wear. I want protection from tree branches and similar, and I don't want to worry about throwing out a $300 single use item after a minor spill.

I don't know if you ride bikes or not. Regardless of this, you should know that bike helmets are safety rated for low-speed crashes only. An example of this collision is a stationary object - e.g. the ground - impacting a moving object - e.g. your head - at a speed of 11-14 miles per hour.

This is what I term "a small subset of crashes".

Realistically, cyclists ride faster than this. And realistically, the types of collisions you want to protect against are not between you and the ground but rather you and a moving object, such as a car. Bike helmets are not rated for these kinds of crashes.

I would not use the Hovding either. The reason I presented it is because it represents a radically redesigned bike helmet.

Anyhow, as I said before, the only thing you can wear to really prevent bad bike accidents is a motorcycle helmet, which are in fact rated for high speed collisions.

I commute by bike on roads shared with cars every day and wear a helmet. When I ride in the whole way to work, I tend to average about 15mph, which is probably about 18mph if I count only time actually moving. Some cyclists can ride far faster than this. Most cyclists ride slower than this. There are far more occasional riders or people taking a mountain bike to Caltrain than there are lycra-suited enthusiasts.

I have never seen any reference to bike helmets being "rated" for a specific speed or type of impact. Bike helmets are approved based on a single test carried out by the CSPC which is not calibrated to correspond to any particular speed or type of impact. I don't consider the method of testing helmets particularly important to the well-supported fact that these helmets significantly reduce the risk of serious head injury and death.

I am not going to go digging for this information for you but essentially the way bike helmets are tested is a weight is dropped onto the helmet traveling at a certain velocity and the result is recorded. It is not representative of the real world and it is only valid for speeds between 11 and 14 mph.

There are no well-supported "facts" that helmets reduce serious head injury. In fact, among the cycling community, it is a very hot point of contention.

Do you disagree with the studies showing that helmets prevent injuries?

> A 2012 re-analysis of the 16 studies in the Attewell meta-analysis, by Elvik, found that, compared to helmeted cyclists, unhelmeted cyclists were 2.5 times more likely to sustain a brain injury; 2.3 times more likely to sustain a head injury; and 4.3 times more likely to sustain a fatal injury.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_helmet#Science:_measur...

Yes. Those studies are one-sided. It is as I indicated in another post a point of contention among the professional cycling community whether or not helmets do more harm than good (both in accidents and sociologically). Here is a study that was very much talked about in recent years.

http://www.drianwalker.com/overtaking/

A Google search will reveal other similar studies as well. Wikipedia is not comprehensive.

I agree that a motorcycle helmet would offer more protection than your typical bicycle helmet. Unfortunately, a motorcycle helmet is a complete non-starter for road cyclists. No one I ride with would even tolerate a full-face mountain biking helmet.

I've been watching the airbags closely since they were first introduced. I look forward to standards bodies developing test methodologies and certifications around them. Then, I'll look forward to the reliability reports and injury statistics as they are adopted.

Of course it is a non-starter. I agree, and I would never wear a motorcycle helmet on my bike. I don't even wear a helmet. My point is simply that the degree of protection a bicycle helmet offers is oversold.

Once you go that far, you might as well ride a motorcycle or a scooter. You can wear much better safety gear and are fast enough to keep pace with traffic.

There is nothing preventing a cyclist from wearing motorcycle gear on a bike. I would never do it though because it isn't practical. But this is precisely the point I am getting at and in fact I do not wear a helmet at all.

As for saying "you might as well ride a motorcycle or a scooter" - you're missing the point entirely. As a cyclist, I don't ride for any other reason than I prefer it.

If you want to say that a car is slower, I would beg to differ. In normal commuting traffic, I blow past the parking lot that urban streets effectively become at rush hour.

Once you go that far, why not drive an SUV? You won't even notice all the scooters and pedestrians you run over!

The reason we ride bicycles is that bicycles are perfect vehicles, and require no "safety gear" whatsoever.

You can wear whatever safety gear you want on a bike. It's just that bicycle crashes are usually so low energy that motorcycle gear is overkill. On a motorcycle, road rash can grind flesh off down to the bone. Nothing's stopping you from wearing a motorcycle jacket, full finger gloves etc. every time you get on a bicycle though.