What's wrong with
We're not opposed to helmets, we're
opposed to helmet laws.
There's a huge difference.
Here's an outline of the arguments against helmet
I. Won't enhance
A. Helmet laws discourage cycling, and fewer
cyclists on the road makes cycling more dangerous.
(Fewer cyclists: CycleHelmets.org,
More dangerous: Injury
B. Helmet efficacy is greatly exaggerated, and
C. Helmet laws feed the idea that helmets are the
first & last words in bike safety, and thus distract
from measures that can actually keep bicyclists safe.
Governments & parents will thus feel that once
they've slapped a helmet on a kid's head they've done
their part. This is equivalent to giving someone a flak
jacket and having them run around a firing range. It's
better to learn how to
not get hit in the first place.
D. The health benefits in longevity from cycling
without a helmet outweigh the risk of cycling.
(HEAD INJURIES AND BICYCLE HELMET
LAWS Accident Analysis & Prevention, by Robinson DL.
28(4):463-475, 1996 Jul. Abstract Copyright (C) 1996
Elsevier Science Ltd. [References:
II. Downsides (Unintended
A. Discourages cycling because people will
prefer to not ride rather than wear a helmet
B. Discourages cycling because it promotes an idea of
cycling as inherently dangerous
C. Destroys the possibility of municipal bike
sharing/rental programs. (These are
systems where there are bicycles located throughout a
city at kiosks where anyone can easy get a bike for a
short trip. Many cities are implementing these to reduce
the amount of driving. If helmets are required, these
programs won't work. No one is going to happen to have a
helmet with them when they think to hire a bike, and if
helmets are provided, few people are going to wear
helmets that were worn by many other people before
C. Helmeted cyclists more likely to be struck by
D. Fewer cyclists = more drivers = more global
E. Fewer cyclists = more drivers = more toxic
F. Fewer cyclists = more drivers = more energy use;
G. Fewer cyclists = more dangerous for the cyclists
who remain (motorists less used to seeing/expecting
cyclists on the road) (Injury
H. Fewer cyclists = more drivers = more danger for
other motorists and pedestrians
I. At-fault motorists not held accountable for
hitting & killing cyclists. It's already
a problem, because cyclists are seen as inherently
culpable. With a helmet law, that problem is
III. Problems with
A. Selective enforcement: cyclists will be
arrested and go to jail, not just ticketed. It happened
last time, it'll happen again.
B. Minorities suffer
disproportionately: Over 90% of no-helmet
tickets given to kids in Austin went to black &
C. Children treated as criminals. Here's an article
about a nine-year-old
in Florida who was handcuffed for not wearing a
D. Expensive to enforce.
E. Distracts police from real public safety
F. Police may suspend enforcement in response to the
above problems. (As we write this in 2006, we understand
that no helmet-law tickets have been given to kids in the
last four years.) A law that isn't enforced provides zero
IV. Not the best way to get people
to wear helmets, and wear them correctly. Better
A. Providing free helmets
B. Providing free bike safety training, including
training on how to properly fit a helmet.
Most helmet users probably wear their helmets
V. Wrong solution to the
A. Real bike safety involves
preventing cyclists from getting hit in the first
place. Thus helmets should be the *last* line of
defense, not the first.
B. Passing a helmet law provides the illusion
that government has done something significant for
C. Better ways to address bike safety
1. Implementing a three-foot passing rule for
motor vehicles passing cyclists
2. Banning cars from parking in bike lanes
3. Striping more bike lanes
4. Creating bike-only thoroughfares
5. Incorporating bike safety training into public
6. Providing free bike safety classes to the
7. Enforcing traffic laws, for both motorists and
8. Holding at-fault motorists fully accountable
when they injure or kill cyclists
VI. Singles cyclists out for
A. Way more motorists die from head injuries
than cyclists. If we're serious about saving lives,
we'd make motorists wear helmets.
B. Seat belts aren't comparable. Seat belt
efficacy has been overwhelmingly demonstrated; bike
helmet efficacy has not. Seat belts come with the
vehicle; bike helmets do not. Seat belt legislation
doesn't impact whether people will drive; bike helmet
laws discourage people from biking. Seat belts don't mess
up the operator's hair, and are not oppressively
uncomfortable in the summer.
VII. Restricts freedom of
A. Government's role is to protect us from each
other, not from ourselves.
1. Helmet laws are nanny laws, since they
seek to take away our choice to decide for ourselves
2. Seatbelt laws aren't comparable. Seatbelts help
protect people other than the operator: they prevent
the driver from being thrown into a passenger during a
crash, crushing a passenger, and help the driver keep
control of the vehicle in a crash rather than being
thrown from the driver's seat. But helmet laws have no
potential benefit to anyone other than the user.
B. If we assume that government can act to protect us
from ourselves anyway when there is a compelling public
interest, we see there is no compelling public interest
for helmet laws:
1. Helmet efficacy has been exaggerated and
2. Helmet laws make cycling less safe overall (see
3. The number of potential fatalities that might be
prevented is tiny.
4. Making cyclists wear helmets when motorcyclists
don't have to is silly. As Amy Babich said, "Our
message then is, 'If you don't want to ride a bicycle
without a helmet, ride a motorcycle instead.' "
5. Restricting cyclists' choice is inconsistent
considering that there is way more public benefit to
be derived by helmeting motorists.
6. The experience of other communities in passing
helmet laws has not shown an overall concrete benefit
to justify restricting cyclists' choice.
VIII. Hurts pedicab
A. No one will buy a pedicab ride if they have
to wear helmets.
B. If passengers are exempted from helmets but the
operator is not, the message to potential customers is
that the ride is dangerous.
IX. Responses to proponents'
"Helmets save lives"
A. Helmet efficacy is exaggerated and unproven.
B. Saying that HELMETS save lives is *completely
different* than saying that helmet LAWS save lives.
C. Helmet laws make cycling *more* dangerous, since
helmeted cyclists are more likely to be hit
of Bath) and because
such laws decrease the number of cyclists on the
D. If helmets save lives, we should helmet motorists,
since far more motorists die from head injuries than
E. We don't automatically outlaw everything that saves
lives. Banning meat consumption would save lives, but
that's not sufficient grounds for making it
F. Even if helmets save lives, there are other, better
ways to make cycling safer, such as a three-foot passing
rule and car-free bike lanes. Helmet law proponents
never argue for these.
Elaboration on some of
Helmet use among U.S. cyclists was nearly
non-existent before the 1990's. Nobody wore helmets in
the 80's and before. So what happened when helmet use
skyrocketed in the 1990's? Head injuries went down,
No, head injuries went up. Let me repeat that:
When helmet use went up, so did head injuries.
There's a big article
about this in the New York Times, showing that head
injuries among cyclists went up 51% in the 1990's as more
and more cyclists started wearing helmets.
not suggesting that helmets caused the head
injuries; there are other plausible explanations for why
head injuries increased (more attention to helmets and
less attention to safe riding skills being one of them).
But what I am saying is that the protective value of
helmets is so small it's hard to measure.
Most of us have heard that "bicycle helmets can
prevent up to 85% of head injuries". Many times the
phrase is printed without the "up to", stating flatly
that bike helmets "prevent 85% of head injuries".
Typically, no source is ever cited for this 85% figure.
Everyone believes it anyway, so who needs a source,
right? But where did this 85% figure come from, and is it
credible? The answer is that it came from a flawed 1989
study, and it's probably wildly inaccurate. The study was
roundly criticized in the Helmet
FAQ by the Ontario Coalition for Better Cycling and
This paper is by far
the most frequently cited research paper in support of
the promotion of cycle helmets. It is referred to by
most other papers on helmets, to the extent that some
other papers, and most helmet promotion policies, rely
fundamentally upon the validity of its
The claims that helmets
reduce head injuries by 85% and brain injuries by 88%
come only from this source, yet are quoted widely as
gospel by people who know nothing more about cycle
helmets. The prospect of achieving such massive
reductions in injuries to cyclists lies at the root of
helmet promotion and mandatory helmet laws around the
Those who have taken the
trouble to analyse the paper in detail, however, have
found it to be seriously flawed and its conclusions
They also note that not a single helmeted
cyclist considered in the study was involved a
collision with a motor vehicle!
CycleHelmets has other good information, such as the
chart at right showing that countries
with the most helmet use also have the most head
injuries. This is important enough that it bears
repeating: countries with the most helmeted cyclists
also have the highest rate of cycling head injuries.
And of course the converse is true: cycling head injuries
are much lower in countries where cyclists don't wear
helmets very much.
Some believe that helmets can actually promote
injuries in various ways. One way is that they
effectively make the cyclist's "head" much larger, so
with a bigger head a falling cyclist is much more likely
to slam it against the road or a car (causing traumatic
brain injury because the brain is still slammed against
the skull), or possibly even breaking the cyclist's neck.
If this is true then it could explain why we don't see
any reduction in cyclist fatalities when helmet use goes
up: helmets could be saving some cyclists but killing
Helmet laws distract
people from real bike safety
Once a community passes a child helmet law
parents and legislators think they've addressed the issue
of bike safety and then pay no more attention to it. This
leaves all those newly-helmeted kids with no riding
skills on dangerous streets prime targets for getting
hit, and their little piece of styrofoam will usually be
cold comfort when they do. It is far more important to
ensure that children know how
to not get hit by cars, that they have lights on
their bikes at night, and that roadways are constructed
to be friendly to bicycle
traffic. The fact
that helmets have become a panacea is evidenced by all
the cyclists who now ride around at night in pitch-black
dark wearing their trusty helmet and having no lights at
all. They don't realize that unlike lights, a helmet will
do absolutely nothing to prevent them from being hit by
The longevity benefits
from cycling unhelmeted outweigh the risks
"The benefits of cycling, even without a helmet,
have been estimated to outweigh the hazards by a factor
of 20 to 1 (Hillman 1993; Cycle helmets-the case for and
against. Policy Studies Institute, London).
Consequently, a helmet law, whose most notable effect
was to reduce cycling, may have generated a net loss of
health benefits to the nation. Despite the risk of
dying from head injury per hour being similar for
unhelmeted cyclists and motor vehicle occupants, cyclists
alone have been required to wear head protection.
Helmets for motor vehicle occupants are now being
marketed and a mandatory helmet law for these road users
has the potential to save 17 times as many people from
death by head injury as a helmet law for cyclists without
the adverse effects of discouraging a healthy and
pollution free mode of transport."
(HEAD INJURIES AND BICYCLE HELMET LAWS
Accident Analysis & Prevention, by Robinson DL.
28(4):463-475, 1996 Jul. Abstract Copyright (C) 1996
Elsevier Science Ltd. [References: 59])
motorists off the hook when they kill helmetless
Defense lawyers love helmet laws because they
can shift the blame to the cyclist for dying even if the
motorist was clearly at fault, and even if the cyclist
would have died even if s/he'd been wearing a helmet.
Bias against cyclists is nothing new. A motorist who
ran a red light and killed cyclist Ben Clough in
1998 didn't even get a traffic ticket. Another motorist
who was incredibly drunk when she killed one cyclist and
injured another safely avoided any conviction. Details of
these cases are in our No Justice
section. If we already have a hard time holding
at-fault motorists accountable because society sees
cyclists as inherently culpable, then passing a helmet
law is just pouring gasoline on that fire.
Making cyclists wear
helmets is insulting what the City intentionally keeps the
roads unsafe for us
Just months before the Council considered the
adult helmet law in 2006, it voted 5-2 to allow cars to
park in bike lanes. (Hello?) The City has no business
instructing cyclists on how to be safe when it does
something as fundamentally retarded is giving our bike
lanes to cars.
In 1996 I was set to be the first pedicab
operator in Austin. The city didn't have a licensing
mechanism, so they initially tried to regulate me under a
combination of the taxicab ordinance and the horse-drawn
carriage ordinance, neither of which was really relevant.
On the taxi side, they were going to require that I carry
a fire extinguisher on my rickshaw. I'm not kidding.
While my application was moving along, the helmet
ordinance passed, and city officials promptly informed
me that both me and my rickshaw passengers would have to
wear helmets. I asked, Okay, assuming for the moment
that I agreed to something so ridiculous, could I get my
permit then? But the city said, No, because there would
be health issues from passengers all sharing the same
More ammunition against
An article decrying the view of helmets as a bicycle
The kitchen sink of helmet info.
Coalition for Better Cycling has an extensive
Helmet FAQ which posits that helmet efficacy is vastly
overrated, and argues forcefully against mandatory helmet
laws. It's very well-researched, with an extensive and
impressive number of credible medical source
Australian experience with a helmet law is
detailed at Cycle-Helmets.com
De Clarke's has a lengthy
article debunking helmet worship, along with a bunch
You can discuss helmet laws on an email
discussion list called cyclehelmets. It's said to
have been started by a bunch of British doctors opposed
to helmet laws.
Here's a review
of the research into helmets (efficacy and
effects of legislation).
Minority kids got most
of the tickets
- 1996-97: 78.26% of
under-16 tickets went to black & Hispanic
kids. Data below gathered by the League of
*We assume the June & July tickets
were given by officers who didn't realize that the
ordinance wasn't supposed to be enforced until Aug.
Aug. 19, 1996 - Feb. 1, 1997
Violators were 12-52 years old
54.79% in their 20's
21.84% under 21
74.54% over 16 were white
78.26% of violators 16 and under were
Hispanic and black
Times tickets issued:
26.59% from 3-6pm
10.98% from 4-5pm
Tickets issued by:
121 APD (9 officers issuing 28%)
10 Park Police (5 officers issuing 19.5%)
14 officers (less than 11% of force) issued
33% of tickets within 5 blocks of UT
(16.5) on Guadalupe between 15-31st St.
- 1997-99: 92% of kid
tickets went to minority kids (10/97 - 1/99)
- 1999-02: (nobody studied
this period that we know of)
- 2002-06: Our
understanding is that police stopped enforcing the
ordinance and issued no more tickets, although the law is
still on the books