Kevin Vranes has a phud in Physical Ocean- ography and Cli- matology. He now studies sci- ence policy and politics at the I haven't written about science and sports in a while, but here's a big piece of news that just caught my eye. It's about risk analysis.
Like Pennsylvania, the state of Colorado does not have a helmet law. When I ride I wear one anyway (I was riding a 1994 Yamaha Seca II and am now in the process of buying an '03 or '04 Yamaha FZ1). If I crash I want to keep my face and brain. I recognize that other aspects of a crash can have bad outcomes, but it seems sufficiently obvious that I'd be orders of magnitude better off with a helmet on than without one. Maybe it's common sense, maybe it's the insurance stats:
1. The most deadly injuries to the accident victims were injuries to the chest and head.2. The use of the safety helmet is the single-most critical factor in the prevention or reduction of head injuries.
3. The use of the full facial coverage helmet increases protection, and significantly reduces face injuries.
4. Safety helmet use caused no attenuation of critical traffic sounds, no limitation of precrash visual field, and no fatigue or loss of attention; no element of accident causation was related to helmet use.
5. There is not liability for neck injury by wearing a safety helmet; helmeted riders had less neck injuries than unhelmeted riders.
Some still don't want to believe it, though. I've read it plenty of times and even met a rider or two who told me, with a straight face, that helmets made them less safe because they obscure vision and hearing.
In the end, you make your own risk-reward calculation. And apparently the reigning Super Bowl-winning QB made the decision that the reward of not wearing a helmet was worth the very clear, very well-identified risk of being seriously F'd up by crashing without one. And apparently the reigning Super Bowl QB has paid the price of his hubris personal calculation. I sincerely hope he gets better very quickly. I also seriously hope this sets an example to other riders that this particular risk-reward calculation is so far skewed to the risk as to be completely ludicrous that anybody would choose to not wear a helmet. I've been riding for fifteen years, have been on many riding forums, ridden with many, talked to many. I have heard of only one happy outcome of a crash without a helmet. It happened to a good friend of a good friend. The story is here and MoFo was lucky.
PS - If you read the interview with BR that I linked above, you see him making the absurd link between riding safety and choice of ride. He claims that since he rides Harley instead of Hayabusa, he's safer. It's akin to saying "Some choose to smoke cigarettes, but I choose to smoke cigars so I'm safer than the cigarette smokers." In the end we're still talking about behavioral choice. The bike doesn't make you safer, your choices do.
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Comments
# 1 | James Annan | June 13, 2006 1:01 AM
Just out of interest, do you wear a helmet when driving a car or walking?
Assuming you don't, do you have a rational explanation for your decisions?
Or perhaps you would accept that scientific evidence can never by itself determine policy and behavioural decisions...who'd of thunk it :-)
# 2 | David McCabe | June 13, 2006 2:21 AM
> Just out of interest, do you wear a helmet when driving a car or walking?
When in a car, I am already surrounded by a strong steel frame that provides more protection than any helmet. When walking, I am not moving at high speed and thus am not liable to be flung headlong towards the pavement. If I am hit by a car, the main injury would be directly from the impact of the car. This should be obvious.
# 3 | John Fleck | June 13, 2006 1:54 PM
I too am interested in the answer to James's question. I never ride my bicycle without a helmet, yet (without making any serious risk calculation whatsoever) I never wear a helmet while driving my car. I don't know the numbers, but it seems obvious that some class of head injuries associated with car accidents would be mitigated by a helmet, the "strong steel frame" notwithstanding.
So what's the calculation, Mr. Risk Calclation?
# 4 | kv | June 13, 2006 2:26 PM
and damnit, I had a answer written already that I lost.
Sure, the rational explanation is that the incremental increase in safety afforded a helmet in 2mph walking does not pay for a big decrease in quality of life by wearing a helmet (getting hot and sweaty, not seeing and hearing the birds flying by, etc.). That's my personal, rational risk-reward calculation (I did say in the post, "In the end, you make your own risk-reward calculation.") Same for the car ride. No data I've seen (not that I've looked hard) says that wearing helmets while driving in a cage improves outcomes. On the other hand, the data very, very clearly says that wearing a helmet while riding a donorcycle definitively increases outcomes. (And yes, I always wear a helmet while cycling.)
On the spirit of the question, I think this one is first about common sense (I alluded to it), backed up by data. You can't fall back on the "science does not compel policy action" argument in any case, but sometimes the common sense is so blatantly obvious that you can reasonably point out fallacious decision-making for going against all reasonable interpretations of the evidence. Common sense confirmed by years of data collection.
But again, it's a personal choice, and of course no data compels particular actions. I'll reevaluate the walking and caging helmetless behavior if you give me stats that show I'm being stupid. 8-)
# 5 | Gaijin Biker | June 14, 2006 4:19 AM
The problem with your analysis is that clearly you could avoid even more injuries by simply not riding motorcycles at all. Yet you do ride them, presumably because you find the fun of it to be worth the risk of injuring or killing yourself in a crash (which can happen even with a helmet).
Roethlisberger found the wind-in-his-hair feeling of riding helmetless to be worth the risk of smashing his face. I personally agree with you that helmets are the way to go, but isn't this really a case of "an alcoholic is someone who drinks more than I do"?
# 6 | James Annan | June 14, 2006 5:30 AM
Well my followup comment seems to have died, but I wrote slightly longer version:
http://julesandjames.blogspot.com/2006/06/bicycle-helmets-and-risk-reward.html
# 7 | Big Ben | June 14, 2006 9:23 AM
I wrote a post on my blog responding to this post, but since I can't trackback, here's the short version:
Kevin, you of all people should know better than to take the statistics in a corporate press release at face value, especially when they conflict with common sense. Helmets have no effect on hearing? Anyone who's worn a helmet knows better. No effect on neck injuries? Heavier head=more neck stress--that's standard physics.
But the main point is, like Gaijin Biker said, if you ride a motorcycle at all, you're taking irrational risks, so you're in no position to call the risk-reward calculations of others "ludicrous". No one can make that kind of value decision better than the individual.
# 8 | kevin v | June 14, 2006 11:45 AM
thanks guys -- yea, I think we're having big comment problems since the change over to the new front page. Sorry!
You guys all make good points, and of course the insurance industry has a vested interest in promoting a certain view point. But on hearing, come on BB. I've riden helmetless (a tiny bit) and helmetful (99% of the time). Are you telling me you can hear ANYTHING at 60mph? 20mph, ok, sure. But if you're out and riding only at 20mph then you're bored out of your mind and why are you riding anyway? Once you hit 50-60mph, the wind in your ears means you can't hear jack and the wind in your eyes is even worse.
Yea, I left aside the starting risk, which is getting on the bike at all. We're not talking about that risk, we're starting after the crash, so we're talking about risks you take once you've already decided to ride. Making the decision to ride in the first place is a whole different conversation.
# 9 | Big Ben | June 14, 2006 8:09 PM
Kevin,
I didn't say I can't hear anything, I said it's ridiculous to say it doesn't make any difference, as the study you cited claims. You're right that at expressway speeds you can probably even hear better with a helmet, but it's street-to-street city riding where you have to be most aware of where cars are. In summer I sometimes ride with a half helmet that exposes my ears and I can tell you it makes a difference.
If the sutdy is only counting sirens and horns as "critical traffic sounds", maybe they're right, but on a motorcycle, a car obliviously switching lanes into you from your blindspot is pretty damn critical, and that's the sort of thing where having your ears free can give you an important edge.
Making the decision to ride in the first place is a whole different conversation.
But it's the same kind of conversation, isn't it? A good argument can be made that the risks involved with motorcycle use, even with the best equipment, far outweigh the benefits. Once you've rejected that argument, it's a little hypocritical to turn around and say that someone who's gone just a little farther down the risk/benefit slope is making a "ludicrous" decision.
# 10 | kevin v | June 16, 2006 3:51 PM
sure, it's the same kind of conversation. you can say motorcycle riding in general is stupid because while motorcycles are about 0.3% of VMT, they make up about 8% of road fatalities: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00031470.htm
but ok, you've made a dumb choice. Now you compound it by making another dumb choice. The risk for head injury is double for helmetless vs. not:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=8323668&dopt=Abstract
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00031470.htm
dumb choices all around and yea, we (including myself) keep making them in spite of the data....