Bradley Wiggins calls for safer cycling laws and compulsory helmets
- Thread starter Accy cyclist
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2, but I am convinced of compulsions effectiveness is putting people off cycling.
So show me the evidence that they work first. And I don't mean anecdotes I mean statistical evidence that helmets have reduced the risk of head injuries in cyclists.
Less than 5% of Boris Bikers in London wear helmets whereas for other cyclists its nearer 50%. The Boris Bikers have a dramatically lower accident and injury rate than the other cyclists. Make of that what you will.
Actually these sorts of debates are very useful. The arguments that have been used to counter attempts at compulsion have largely been honed in forums like this against the died in the wool helmet faithful. So you can in part put the current freedom of choice down to debates like this and thank the pro-helmets contributors for acting as proxies in helping to rehearse the case.
Actually that is incorrect. It used to be that the ONS/DfT only recorded pedestrian accidents which included a vehicle and that is what you will find in the RRCGB datasets. However partly as a result of the advocacy against helmet compulsion DfT became aware that for policy making purposes the figures were misleading and while if you fell off you bike on your own it would be recorded (bike means vehicle involved) if you tripped and fell as a pedestrian it wouldn't (no vehicle involved). So now they have started to look at hospital data that records where the accident happened. Its not yet included in the full RRCGB tables but there has now been a separate report in RRCGB with the additional data. In the last set I looked at about six times as many pedestrians were killed or seriously injured tripping over on the highway as were killed or seriously injured being hit by a vehicle on the highway.
Linford
Guest
How do you define the differences between anecdotal and statistical evidence as something you would acknowledge as having validity ?
To say that anecdotal evidence has no value is absolute rubbish as this is what is used in court when building a case..
Statistical evidence is evidence in published peer reviewed research. The sort of study that Sir Richard Doll did to show that smoking caused lung cancer. Anecdotal evidence is a tale of a single incident or small number of incidents such as your granny living to 100 and being a smoker being anecdotal evidence that smoking is good for you. If you don't understand the difference let me sell you some of this snake oil that my friend swears will enhance your sexual prowess.
Linford
Guest
Unless I am pointing out the obvious, imagine these two scenario's
A) Someone who doesn't wear a lid, has an accident, gets a serious head injury and ends up in hospital as a result - this gets reported and gets a mention in the stats.
B) Someone who is wearing a lid, has an accident, the lid gets destroyed but their head remains intact. They then get up, go to hospital, but no head injury is reported because the lid did its job
It isn't rocket science, and will obviously skew any data collected - and thus give people who don't like looking any further than the end of their nose a reason to put up silly anti arguments
Please tell me you are a graduate
Unless I am pointing out the obvious, imagine these two scenario's
A) Someone who doesn't wear a lid, has an accident, gets a serious head injury and ends up in hospital as a result - this gets reported and gets a mention in the stats.
B) Someone who is wearing a lid, has an accident, the lid gets destroyed but their head remains intact. They then get up, go to hospital, but no head injury is reported because the lid did its job
It isn't rocket science, and will obviously skew any data collected - and thus give people who don't like looking any further than the end of their nose a reason to put up silly anti arguments
Please tell me you are a graduate
Please tell me you are not! No its not rocket science to even an A level student to know that all you need to do at the basic level is look at how many helmeted cyclists you have in hospital with a serious injury and how many without a helmet and then compare that with a count of how many cyclists wear a helmet and how many don't. That will immediately tell you whether helmeted cycllsts are underepresented in hospital admissions or not. And they aren't. There are more sophisticated ways of doing the normalisation than this but this is the simplest to explain.
Perhaps you should take a basic course in experimental design and in statistics because if you haven't understood the above point you won't understand much of the evidence and what are good and bad studies.
Linford
Guest
Can you provide the numbers and their source so we can look at them ?
We are talking about someone not reporting a head injury so never appearing in the head injury stats because the lid has done its job properly.
The cycle hat has become a victim of its own success by working so well
Now if we had compulsion, then we would have a proper dataset to work with
Melon time?
srw
It's a bit more complicated than that...
No wonder P&Lite has been quiet of late. I make a rule of almost never reading about helmets or headphones (but a category mistake by an engineer between logical and physical arguments riled me recently), and this wonderful Linfy-baiting has completely passed me by until now.
Since no contribution to this thread appears to be complete without anecdote, here are a few of mine.
Since no contribution to this thread appears to be complete without anecdote, here are a few of mine.
- A teenager is knocked off his bike by a lorry. He blacks out briefly; the bike is wrecked. Bike helmets barely exist.
- An undergraduate in his first week at university pushes his bike out from behind a bus to cross the road on foot. He is knocked onto the ground by a car, hits his head and is in intensive care for days and a wheelchair for months. His brother catches the bus north to visit him. A year later he starts his course again and passes.
- A graduate student gets drunk, cycles home and hits the kerb. The bike wheels are buckled and he walks the last hundred metres home. He can't remember how he comes off, but isn't particularly hurt. He's probably wearing a helmet, given the previous anecdote.
- A probationary teacher in his first job is working 18-hour days preparing and marking lessons, and is driving 20 miles each way to work. He falls asleep at the wheel and hits a van head-on. He has a smashed leg. A day later his estranged wife rings his brother to say that the bone marrrow has made its way into his brain and he's been wheeled into neurological intensive care, where he stays for months. 13 years later, after numerous failed attempts at holding down a job he is arguing with Atos about his eligibility for disability benefit. He certainly wasn't wearing a helmet.
- An accountant is riding to work in London during a tube strike. She is hit by a car, breaks a rib (that's a new bike for her husband, thank you Swiftcover) and bends the forks of her bike. She was wearing a helmet.
- A grumpy bloke joins a ride round historic houses on his fixie, because he didn't get around to sorting out a proper bike. He is going down a hill at 30mph when he comes unclipped on a rough section of road and comes a cropper. He's a bit dazed, and is taken to hospital where they discover he does have a brain. Within a few weeks he rides 600-odd miles. He was wearing a cap and no helmet.
srw
It's a bit more complicated than that...
I think the phrase you're looking for is "post-hoc rationalisation".
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