It’s important to recognize two things:
a) Because a concussion is the result of the bran impacting the inside of the skull, a helmet can never prevent it.
b) If I run into a person with my car, they’re going to be messed up. This is why I had to pass tests in order to prove I was capable of operating my vehicle safely. The safety of everyone who may pass in front of my car is my responsibility.

These are facts and there is no way around them. That’s why they’re called “facts”. Nowhere is it written that I will be absolved of all responsibility if I kill someone who is not wearing a helmet.

Riding a bike with no helmet is hardly a death sentence. If it was, the Netherlands would be pretty much wiped out tomorrow. And there’s no way China would account for 1/4 of the world’s population.

I don’t know what the total is now, but as of 23 million rides on US bike-share systems, no bike share rider has died. Not a single one:
http://news.discovery.com/earth/23-million-rides-later-no-us-bike-share-deaths-140813.htm

The most successful bike share systems do not require helmets, and I don’t know anybody who walks around with a helmet “just in case” they might grab a Citi-Bike. Seattle and Sydney bike share systems, for example, are not seeing the use they had hoped for. They only thing they have in common that no successful system is subject to, is helmet laws.

Here’s the thing: I learned to ride as a kid a long time ago and bike helmets were at that point unknown unless you were a bike racer — and even then, I don’t think they were that common (this is the 1970s).

And since nothing untoward happened to me in all those years (up to when I was a teenager) in riding of course, sometimes giving helmets to kids looks a little like overkill. I fell of my bike any number of times — and learned to be more careful afterwards. Maybe that’s part of the problem with the resistance to helmet laws — people know it isn’t logical, but resist anyway, and one reason might be that biking is an activity we associate with childhood. That is, a 5-year-old isn’t ever going to be going that fast, they can only fall so far, so the chances of serious injury are less from the stuff they do and more from other people around them like careless drivers.

But logically I know that adults are a somewhat different matter and that helmets are an unambiguously good idea. Certainly I saw more people wearing them in bike-heavy San Francisco when I moved there in the early 90s. And I see people with them now.

So while I am on board with the head injury issue, I find myself resisting wearing a helmet, even though I know it is the right thing to do.

By the way, I have been in a vehicle accident where I was seriously injured (I was run over by a drunken motorcyclist) — so I am much more supportive of drunk driving laws, and liability for bartenders, so maybe it’s all about what you experience and relate to your own life. Like, I don’t resist seat belt laws at all.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2012/may/04/bi-picture-cycling-copenhagen

It was a horrible day, during (what was) a wonderful time in Milwaukee.

From the A&E reports of the NHS.

Where do you get your figures from? Your anus?

I offer it here in the hope that it might amuse, but also to attempt to make the point that your intuition, informed by who-knows-how-many-years you’ve ridden without a helmet, will lead you to completely erroneous risk-benefit choices.

It’s easy to assume that it won’t happen to you, because it never has. And frankly, it probably never will (“probably” used here in the strict technical sense of “greater than 50% probability”).

But pilots long ago learned this the hard way: “Trust the math, not your gut feel” is written in the blood from a thousand crashes.

If you bet on the come, stake everything on the proposition that your winning streak means you’ll never roll craps, your expected value is negative. That is, if you assign much value to breathing and non-drooling, ambulatory activities.