Is likely due to how humans react to issues. They fix it or make a big deal to over fix it when someone gets hurt. The baseline risk shifts and people will get scared looking back doing a mental calculation: lower risk better then higher risk.
Stuff like training wheels, bike helmets when you are just doing leisure rides. Don't get me started with bike helmets, people wear them and do risker things, drivers drive less careful around them, and you get a false sense of superiority instead of being more careful. If you're on the road/off roading, sure, but now you can get fined in some place for not wearing is one small example of safetyism taking over.
I'm someone who advocates for rolling back helmet laws because they decrease ridership, but helmets are a fantastic example of reasonable PPE, not overactive safetyism.
> Bike helmets mitigate one of the most serious and common forms of injury while riding bikes.
A form that is still extremely rare. No-one seriously advocates helmets for car passengers, for example, even though the injury rates are very similar.
> be hit by a car
Cars don't hit people, drivers hit people.
> They don't prevent you from doing anything you would otherwise do.
They're annoying enough that they do, in practice if not in theory. To say nothing of the fact that drivers pass you closer and more dangerously if you're wearing a helmet.
> helmets are a fantastic example of reasonable PPE, not overactive safetyism.
Quite the opposite.
It's the most common sports related head injury by a wide margin and helmets are quite effective at injury reduction.[1] As a public health policy it makes a lot of sense. Anecdotally I've flown over my handlebars and hit my helmet without serious injury, and I'm sure I would have been in much worse shape otherwise.
On cars the law requires seat belts and airbags and a variety of other legally enforced safety measures. If you have a study suggesting that helmets would significantly help I'd be curious to see it.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7019a1.htm
Not that rare. When I was a kid (in the 90s) I lost two classmates to bike crashes. One actually dead, the other severely brain damaged for life.
Neither accident involved a car.
Both would have likely had a few broken bones at the absolute worst if they’d been wearing helmets.
I wasn’t in an especially large elementary school, either.
I'm sorry for your loss, but your school is very much an outlier; public policy should look at the overall rates, and statistically it is rare. Particularly if we're talking about an everyday school commute along surface roads (the risk profile for mountain biking or BMX-style stunt riding is quite different, and wearing helmets for those activities makes a lot of sense).
Consider the risk compensation theory where people take bigger risks when they feel safer. Not sure how true it is with regards to bike helmets, though. I saw there are a few studies but don't have the time to read them.
I usually wear a helmet but am opposed to such laws not because they decrease ridership but because they decrease our freedom to do stupid shit.
> but helmets are a fantastic example of reasonable PPE
Sure. They should be widely available, cheap or free for kids, public awareness campaigns funded, etc.
> not overactive safetyism.
Not once they devolve into laws. That would be overactive safetyism with the second order effects worse than the cure - as you note earlier in your comment.
I know I simply stopped riding my bike altogether once my mom decided (as a young teen) out of the blue helmets were now required. That or I'd bike a block away, stash it in the bushes, and grab it on the way back home.
And for me it was simply comfort (sweaty!) and the fact I'd forget the damn thing everywhere and be forced to go back to get it/pay for one out of my allowance if I lost it.
> but helmets are a fantastic example of reasonable PPE, not overactive safetyism.
Especially with E-bikes, which are operated at higher average speeds.
As a commuter cyclist of over 20 years, my favorite recent trend are is wearing a bike helmet and giant noise-cancelling headphones at the same time.
To be fair, good noise cancelling headphones nowadays have "transparent" or "ambient aware" modes that actually electronically pipe the outside noise in. (Whether the cyclists in question are actually using that feature, who knows?)
I’ve also seen this. It’s completely insane. Especially when I consider how many times a sound alerted me to a danger while I was on my bike.
People use helmets because they are forced to. Not because they actually believe they are doing something dangerous while casually biking to work. People who got convinced casual biking is dangerous just drive while listening to audio book.
No idea about bicycle, but for motorcycles, integrated helmet headphones are a thing for long time. It maybe helps that a typical motorcycle helmet is quite noise-cancelling by itself, so one relies mostly on moving faster than traffic and if that fails, on mirrors and not on sound.
Besides being an mc person I always considered bicycle helmets a useless compromise in that they don't provide true protection like full-face motorcycle helmets do. You're still as likely to leave half of your face on the obstacle, so either don't bother or wear something that would prevent that.
> You're still as likely to leave half of your face on the obstacle [when wearing a bicycle helmet], so either don't bother or wear something that would prevent that.
With surgical assistance, I can heal from leaving half of my face on an obstacle. Healing from leaving a big chunk of my brain on an obstacle [0] is -at best- quite a bit more involved.
[0] ...or a chunk of an obstacle in my brain...