When I was a child in New Zealand, the government made bike helmets compulsory, which really surprised me as they didn’t seem like they could provide much protection. Years later, living in Europe, I was surprised to see almost no one wearing them. This led me to do some online research and discover that forcing cyclists to wear a helmet may actually cause a net increase in mortality.
Today, I stubmled across a 2012 paper that sums it all up quite well and provides strong arguments against forcing people to wear bike helmets.
The Cost of Discouragement
The analysis in the paper centers on a crucial conflict:
- The Individual Benefit: For any single rider, a helmet is a wise choice, protecting against severe head injuries. The research supports this personal safety benefit.
- The Societal Cost: The health benefits gained from cycling are massive. Over a lifetime, the exercise from riding (reducing heart disease, cancer, etc.) are calculated to outweigh the risk of injury by a large factor.
When bike helmet laws discourage people from cycling, even slightly, the loss of those enormous daily health benefits, can quickly and severely outweigh the health gains achieved by preventing a small number of head injuries.
…even with very optimistic assumptions as to the efficacy of helmets, relatively minor reductions in cycling on account of a helmet law are sufficient to cancel out, in population average terms, all head injury health benefits. – Piet de Jong 2012