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From: Ralph
Subject: Helmets…
Yes wear your helmet, cause you just don’t know. If you knew you’d have
already won the lottery!I was leaving a traffic light when my right pedal snapped off. (Picture 1)
Yea, I should have run it:-) Landed on one side, that left a mark. That is
also when I started to remember things, like where I was, on the road, so
was the bike, and glasses….This is the second time I’ve snapped off a right side Look pedal, chromolly
not Ti. Helmet saved my head, left pieces of it’s self on the road. The
first time I was on my back and the bike landed on me, must have loved that
bike more:-) Even with the helmets I don’t remember the break or hitting the
ground.The third picture is of my SS front wheel. Happened on the way to work. I
was worried about the carbon fiber spokes failing wht with my weight and
all. Wasn’t prepared for the flange going… The got wobbly and didn’t
collapse. Don’t know how many hole would have to go before serious taco and
me over the front.I also hate to see parents put the helmet on the kid and ride with out one
themselves….Try this link for the pics:
Peace,
Ralph
PS. You are welcome to use the pics for educational or any nonprofit use.
Can drunkcyclist be both educational and non-profit?
I’m going to go with a yes on that one.
by 
Maybe you should think about some newer bike parts man…. stuff does not last forever…. it breaks when it gets old like that.
Good thing on the helmets… the work.
Peace
One of the Seattle Randonneurs had a pedal sheer off this past season, unfortunately during a standing climb. The result was a broken femur, which was driven up through his pelvis. He’s recovering, but check your pedals and cranks for cracks!
Wish I could say I’ve never seen that before, but I have more than a couple of hubs laying around with broken flanges- and they’re not old ones, either! I’m talking less than a season in the field and the flanges cracked just like the one in the picture. and I’ve seen a few look pedals lose the spindle too… This is what happens when strength takes a back seat to durability- parts break, followed closely by a broken person.
As KB says: “Cheap, light, strong. Pick Two.” Not having looked at the pictures, stuff does have a service life. We don’t need to always have the newest stuff, but nor can we leave everything in regular use forever…
As soon as someone starts giving helmets away and they actually fit, then I might consider wearing one.
Marrock ~ are you in Flagstaff?
Oh god, a helmet anecdote. I’ve always been of the belief that helmet laws keep kids off bikes. I’d rather see a kid on a bike without a helmet, then a kid on the couch. Helmet laws make every day people think that cycling is a dangerous activity.
Anyone who travels around the world to countries where people, young and old, use bikes as a daily mode of transportation, will tell you they don’t see those people with helmets.
Can’t ride down the store to pick up a couple items on your bike without armoring up. It’s to dangerous. Jump in the SUV instead where it’s safe.
Wear one because you know anything can happen. Three ct scans later and i didn’t even see what hit me. I
Guys–
Helmets save lives, plain and simple. This has been proven for decades and applies to motorcycles as well as bicycles. The objections to helmet laws are typically emotional and irrational.
With that said, citing a cyclist for not having a helmet when he’s riding down a residential street a few blocks to the mini-mart amounts to harassment. Common sense applies.
Frankly, what bother me more than cyclists being harassed by the police, is seeing young dudes on high-performance bikes slashing through city traffic and blitzing intersections. Bad enough here in Pugetropolis where everyone wears a helmet (by law) but worse in Portland, where some of these same “organ donors” (to borrow a motorcycling term) don’t wear helmets. That’s not ballzy, it’s stoopid.
Mikey
“Anyone who travels around the world to countries where people, young and old, use bikes as a daily mode of transportation, will tell you they don’t see those people with helmets.”
They’ll also tell you that they see welders standing on sketchy bamboo scaffolding squinting through the bottom of a broken beer bottle held up to one eye. I’m not for mandatory anything, but if you choose not to wear a helmet, please choose to be an organ donor.
Nope, nowhere near the AZ, I’m out on the east coast.
Marrock ~ Aight man. If you were here, I’d offer you a freebie.
I really appreciate the sentiment.
I already have one picked out I’d really like to get but they still insist on expecting money in exchange and right now I can’t even manage a new innertube… nevermind $100 for a helmet.
I know that’s thought by some to be expensive but it’s the only one I’ve found that’s a size that’ll fit me.
My personal approach to helmet purchases is this:
1. Find the helmet that fits me best. Used to be Giro, now it’s Bell.
2. Buy it, regardless of cost.
You can survive pretty much everything except a traumatic head injury. (There are exceptions, but y’all know exactly what I mean.)
I will gladly contribute $5 to Marrock’s Helmet Acquisition Fund – who’s with me?
I forgot to mention the reason for my Personal Approach to Helmet Purchases (TM): it’s foolish to take a chance on hurting my brain for the sake of a few dollars.
I just started grad school and decided that if I am going to spend all of this money and time investing in my education, I should protect the part of me that houses that investment. That being said, I don’t wear a helmet for commuting or going to the store (2 miles round trip) but anything farther and I slap it on.
You may find it funny but the reason I have difficulty finding anything that fits is because I just happen to have a thick skull… literally, the bone is twice as thick as normal which makes it rather difficult to find things that fit.
I can give lethal headbutts when the mood strikes me.
I once cracked a motorcycle helmet on a dare, I was fine but the guy wearing it was out for about eight hours.
I have my bennie man..
skid mark Joe
I have this “old school” mentality that keeps me from wearing a helmet. If I actually wore one, I’d have to beat myself up just on principal. ha ha
helmet saved my life. that light weight Giro you have is worth every penny and works as well any on the market
…i hope big jonny was wearing a helmet when the eagles beat the cowboys…
…cuz he was problly flippin’ n’ floppin’ around the house like a fresh hooked salmon in the bottom of the boat…
MY my what a helmet thread. Wear em or help drain the gene pool.
And replace em.
The foam in an old helmet gets hard & brittle after a few years, doesn’t take the hit like it’s supposed to.
And that cracked old old one with the exoskeleton peeled away…not gonna help ya,..toss it.
20 somethin years of helmets, and I’ve only had to replace one because of old age.
I have a friend who does spinal & brain injuries at Johns Hopkins. Apparently it sucks ass to tell people they will never walk again.
Wear the damn thing.
After my wreck I wear a full face cycling helmet (BMX or downhill). Plastic surgery is wonderful, you can hardly tell where they sewed my face back on, but I don’t want to do that again. Where they stitched me back together didn’t stop itching for 6 weeks until all the stiches were absorbed.
Oh, yeah if I hadn’t been wearing a helmet I would have died. There were 4 impact sites on the helmet counting the big skidmark that almost took off my face. Any of them would have been enough to kill me without the skid lid. As it was I lost all my foreign languages and a goodly chunk of English, and have some difficulty speaking when I don’t rehearse the speach ahead of time. Typing ain’t too much fun either but my fingers work better than my mouth when I try to communicate. I still have a hard time finding the words, but at least I don’t have to begin the thought over to find my place and the missing word.
Opus
http://tinyurl.com/2h2nub
“Ordinary cycling is not demonstrably more dangerous than walking or driving,”
If you’re not wearing a helmet when you’re walking the streets, then you’re not following your own logic.
I wear a helmet sometimes, sometimes I don’t. But to go all religious about them is stupid. Yeah you can fall and get hit by cars, but people walking down the street fall and get hit by cars just about as often.
In fact, the next time you go pub crawling, you’re at a pretty good risk at falling in a drunken stupor, better well you’re helmet, you never know.
“A study of cycling in major streets of Boston, Paris and Amsterdam illustrates the variation in cycling culture: Boston had far higher rates of helmet-wearing (32% of cyclists, versus 2.4% in Paris and 0.1% in Amsterdam), Amsterdam had a far higher numbers of cyclists (242 passing bicycles per hour, versus 74 in Paris and 55 in Boston). The Dutch Institute for Road Safety Research (SWOV) advocates helmet use and helmet laws to further improve cycling safety. The UK’s CTC say that cycling in the Netherlands and Denmark is perceived as a “normal” activity requiring no special clothing or equipment”
Helmet zealots keep cycling from being an every day normal activity in the US. They turn it into some ‘dangerous’ activity that frankly, keeps people off bikes.
I teach high school and my students see me ride my bike to school every day and it’s really hard for them to see it as anything but a fringe activity. I see approximately 12-18 bikes locked up to the bike rack each morning in a school of 1500+ students. And two of those bikes belong to my own kids.
Do you know what kind of a pita it is to carry a helmet around all day with you? It won’t fit in a locker and you can’t leave it on the bike. Most of those kids just skirt the law and ride anyway but they risk a ticked every day. I guess according to many of you on here, they’re also risking their lives by riding their bikes to school.
I tell you this right now, there are no fat kids riding to school, they’re riding in the cars. Which is riskier?
Today’s Urban Velo link, people cycling in Amsterdam…. what do you notice missing from these pictures.
http://copenhagengirlsonbikes.blogspot.com/
You’d think the streets would be littered with people suffering head injuries, brain damaged and disfigured people everywhere you looked. I guess they keep those people hidden away.
no carssssssssssssssss. woooooooooo hooooooooo.. hot chicks
on bikes.. :)))))
Helmets, I believe are a good call but I think making them mandatory is stupid. I beleive doing so muddies up the gene pool by allowing stupid people the ability to keep breeding. Now saying that I wear one for club rides, training rides and MTB or cross rides. Just jamming around town on the fixie…nope. I will say that my first time out on a Mountain bike I went to go do a nice 10 ft roll in and cut it short. Squashed out the front tire and fell about 8 feet. The first thing to hit the ground was my head. I was wearing a helmet because my buddy made me. I thank him all the time.
There is a big differenece between riding in a park at 2-3 miles per hour than zipping through rush hour at 20-30. It is a chance you choose to take, but all it takes is once. How many people buckle up? As a driver I feel safer without it on. side impact can be more damaging with a belt on.
Hey Freddy, want an address to send the helmet to once you collect the funds? ;)
Let’s see, a good helmet costs about $100. Many less, some more. What does a trip to the ER cost? How about care after a brain injury. A week in the hospital cost me $30K, not counting the 3 surgeries and 10 weeks of follow up care, which totaled around $150K. Much of that was for leg injuries, but you get the picture on expense Head injuries are more expensive. The helmet was the only reason I am alive. A funeral averages $6000+. On a cost-benefit approach, it pays out by far. If you don’t want to wear one, don’t. Be my guest and Darwin Award yourself. You probably shouldn’t buy health insurance either. Or wear a seatbelt. As long as I don’t have to pay for your stupidity. Oh wait, I do in higher insurance rates and taxes.
Cycling isn’t popular as alternative transportation in the US because of the dangerous conditions cyclist on the roads face, not because of helmets. To say that helmets keep people from riding is the dumbest thing I’ve heard in a long time. People don’t ride in the US because the first thing 99% of people consider for transportation is their car.
Guys–
Mr. Jefe is absolutely correct. Riding at 10 MPH in bike lane in Amsterdam is WAY THE HELL different than banging elbows at 25 MPH with enraged SUV drivers here in Pugetropolis. As I said before, common sense applies.
Mikey
oooh kaaay. to be a good bike advocate you need to discourage brain hats because it makes cycling seem like a fringe activity….
Duuuude, I wanna smoke the shit yer getting cause mine just don’t do me proud like that.
WTF?
Make people feel safe in the places they wish to ride..
and if you wanna bikes not seem fringe…then a tv show of emergency room docs who just do bike medice, or a bike crime show, or the sitcom funny goings on at the bike shop with all the hot chicks.
of course bikes are finge nutjob fodder, ..
that’s why ya come to the DC!