Helmets

Here's one that I never thought I'd agree with:

Perhaps the need for bike helmets is bogus. (You'll never convince me that there's no need for motorcycle helmets, so don't bother trying.)

I've been reading various articles on bicycle helmets, and several things caught my attention.

1. After crashes involving head impacts, when bike helmets are inspected, often (almost always?) the foam in the helmet is not compressed, even though that's how helmets are supposed to protect heads. That means that the skull was compressed, instead. And children's skulls are softer, and thus more compressible, than adult ones. That's not to say that I wouldn't prefer to slam my head into a hard piece of foam rather than a hard piece of concrete. There's incompressible and incompressible.

2. The statistics for head injuries by bicyclists are no worse than those for pedestrians. So why don't we wear helmets while we walk? (And mirrors: I've often been tempted to hook my mirror to my cap visor when I walk. My wife won't let me.)

And then I started thinking about all the falls I've had in 40 years of biking. In all that time, with easily a dozen falls in which I ended up sprawled on the ground, I have never once, not a single time, hit my head, whether it was in a helmet or not. That includes all the times I've gone over my handlebars or wiped out on ice. The only time my helmet has suffered an impact was when the car stopped in it after I fell. (The helmet was tied to my panniers.)

And, of course, there's the issue of the goofy aero helmets that don't protect the back of the head. Why is that desirable? And the issue of people who wear their helmets incorrectly (which is, like, everybody).

Am I going to stop wearing a helmet? I guess not, although, really, when you're riding a fully loaded touring bike going 12 mph, what are the chances of a head injury? But I am going to stop worrying about my 16 year old son who doesn't wear one.