Jul
9
Category: 
|I love cycling. Some people may have noticed this. I love the freedom, the pain, (perhaps more particularly, the sensation when the pain stops at the top of a climb), the speed and the countryside. I love having to think about what I’m doing in traffic. I love the great feeling of being alive that comes from a good cycle ride. There are two kinds of people: those who love cycling and those who are wrong.
I don’t love plastic hats, yet a tedious number of people who risk their lives by eating too much for their sedentary lifestyles, by not exercising enough or by stressing about other people’s wellbeing, seem to think that I and other cyclists am stupid for wearing a stylish cycling cap (well, I think it’s stylish) to keep the sun out of my eyes (at the moment the sun seems to be wet and forming puddles), rather than a plastic hat to act as some form of talisman.
If you are one of those people, please read on.
Dr. Mark Porter in The Scotsman writes:
Boris Johnson was recently pilloried for cycling without a helmet, but what sort of impact has their introduction really made? How much safer is Boris now that he reluctantly coats his cranium in carbon-fibre?
It may seem counterintuitive, but the benefits are far from clearcut. On the positive side, there are numerous reported cases where helmets appear to have protected cyclists from serious head injuries that could have left them permanently disabled or dead. Yet, on the negative side, these cases appear to be the exception rather than the rule, and need to be weighed against the fact that the wind-in-the-hair sensation appears to be one of the attractions of cycling, and that forcing cyclists to wear protective headgear discourages them from using their bikes.
[…] The Bicycle Helmet Research Foundation estimates that the average cyclist would have to pedal the roads for more than 3,000 years to suffer a serious head injury, let alone one that would be mitigated by a cycle helmet. And children are four times more likely to suffer a head injury as a pedestrian than when they are on their bikes (so why don’t we make them wear helmets when they are walking along the pavement?)
