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Helmetless biking (and skiing, omg, the 0-to-100 in the uptake rate of ski helmets in Europe in the past decade is making me fume) achieves a lot. It makes the difference between a bike being something you can just hop onto, go from A to B with and leave wherever, and it being an activity that requires locating a particular piece of gear and hauling it with you everywhere at the destination, leaving you with either -1 hand or -1 head's worth of volume in whatever bags you bring until you return home, unless you engage in extra planning to be able to leave it somewhere.
Seatbelts are ok because the delta-inconveniencs to driving is small. Bike helmet advocates, though, belong together with Rust programmers and playground securers on the scrap heap of history for being scolds that would sap all efficiency and convenience out of life by a thousand cuts for the sake of their padded-cell utopia.
Yeah, I normally wear a helmet when I bike for recreation, but when I commuted partly by bicycle I certainly didn't. Both because it's inconvenient and because I'm not exactly screaming down hills at 40mph when I'm commuting. Ironically my commute put me through the one local town which requires bike helmets for adults, but fuck them anyway.
(Dorkiness when biking for recreation is not really affected by the helmet, because the rest of the kit already maxed that out)
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I mean, why are we scared to say that the bike and ski helmets are inherently unaesthetic, dorky, and weird looking? Riding a bike is already fairly unaesthetic, but riding a bike with a helmet is basically doomed to dorkiness, and the more the helmet is optimized for any functional purpose the worse it tends to look. I do typically wear a helmet when I ride any considerable distance, but I'm under no illusion that I look at all cool doing so.
That said, seatbelts I remain a fan of. The numbers simply are what they are, and I don't think avoiding a seatbelt is really any improvement in comfort in a modern vehicle. I do occasionally drive classics that feature no or minimal seatbelts, and I suppose I'm taking a risk there but there's a corresponding benefit. My favorite tuner car modifications to see young guys drive around with are the addition of aesthetically obvious safety features. The fire extinguisher ostentatiously anchored to the floor in easy reach, the two strap hanging off the bumper, the four point racing harness in the driver's seat.
The idea that bike helmets look "dorky" is very alien to my lifelong sensibility on this point. They look sporty. Professional competitive bikers on television have them - they're part of the same aesthetic as football helmets or hockey masks, they have a kind of paramilitary-looking toughness about them. I will grant @4bpp the point that they are cumbersome, though.
I dunno, pros seldom raced in helmets until ~2002, maybe a little earlier in cobbled classics, and I definitely think the sport was more aesthetic pre-helmet. Not saying it's not worth it, on net, but.
The UCI started requiring helmets during the Armstrong years (there was a year or so in which they were allowed to remove them on a terminal climb in a race). The aesthetics are maybe worse (Fignon's pony tail!), but there really have been (and continue to be, and I'm not going to look at rigorous stats right now) a number of fatal high-speed crashes in bike races that helmets may mitigate somewhat.
My understanding is that the occasionally-seen soft helmets of the 80s were less about mitigating concussion-type injuries and more about road rash on scalps. I'd like to think the science has gotten better there.
It was most probably the UCI requirement that did it. My recollection is there is (was?) a slight areo, cooling, and obvious weight, penalty. At least, excepting TT specific helmets on the areo front.
The science has developed quite a bit over the last decade, I think because the NFL poured money into helmet research to show they they were doing something about CTE. There's now coverage for a huge variety of helmet types, including most cycling disciplines. If you were ever unfortunate enough to actually need protection from a helmet, I assume anthing rated by any reputable agency would be better than nothing. The Virginia Tech lab seems to publish the most about the methodology and have an extremely extensive testing protocol though.
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I think this attitude comes from having grown up as helmet adoption was first spreading. The cool kids did not wear helmets. It was the dorks who had helmets forced on them by their parents, and were too obedient to discard them once out of sight.
The helmet campaign was totalizing and successful. Kids born in the late 90s see them in all the media they consume and every kid wears them. Though as an elder millennial of a toddler I do notice the other dads my age sometimes give in to their kids hopping on a balance bike while leaving their helmets on the ground.
People who graduated high school before roughly 1992 wouldn’t have been exposed to the dynamics introduced by the helmet campaign and so can reasonably view them as the domain of Lance Armstrongs.
Well, now, I wouldn't go so far as to say that I saw no "aw, making sure to put your helmet first, are we? what are you, a baby?" grandstanding from wannabe-toughies. "It's dorky to wear a helmet" is not an alien sentiment to me. What I objected to was the idea that it is a truth universally acknowledged that bicycle helmets, as a piece of gear, look dorky. An oversized one painted in bright primary colors, such as a worrywart mother might give to a nine-year-old - sure, that looks a bit dorky. But a sleek pro-type one, I just don't see it.
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