I bought a new helmet for my downhill biking. It’s almost lighter than some road bike helmets and has great air flow. Wear a helmet, people. Your noggin is precious and cars and trucks are aiming for us.
I hope your downhill helmet has a face/jaw.
Source: my previously broken face/jaw.
I wear a full helmet for any bike riding now
Its a smith mainline. Full face but it only weighs like 600 grams.
helmets aren’t made to protect you from “cars and trucks” but from falls
false sense of security
Cars and trucks can still smack your melon, or otherwise cause your melon to get smacked.
getting downvoted but you are 100% correct.
ignorance on this comment thread deep. people here don’t have any idea what they are talking about and just want to blowhard about how helmet wearing is the issue.
if you’re going 25mph on an ebike, a helmet isn’t going to stop you from fucking up your head.
it’s not like the information is not easily accessible 🤷
Falls that can come from avoiding cars and trucks…
People are downvoting you but you are right. Bicycle helmets are not designed for impact collisions with vehicles and wearing a helmet vs not wearing one — in motor vehicle accidents — statistically doesn’t matter very much.
But why does this matter? Two reasons:
— Studies have shown that motor vehicle drivers are more likely to give a cyclist more space when passing if the cyclist is not wearing a helmet. Drivers think helmet = protected and no helmet = squishy.
— People tend to blame cyclists for their injuries if they weren’t wearing a helmet. Victim blaming is bad. A cyclist can certainly be at fault in an accident, but they don’t deserve their injuries.
That said, I still always wear a helmet when riding in the US because drivers are crazy, our road infrastructure is usually in disrepair, and I am capable of making mistakes that could lead me to fall.
I also had an incident two years ago where I was cycling downhill on a road, going 22 mph, and a child ran out right in front of me. Thankfully my hydraulic brakes did their job and I stopped me amazingly quickly, but my back wheel also came a foot off the ground. I was so close to going over my handlebars and cracking my head on the pavement.
i went over my handlebars a couple of times and once had a collision with a car that ran the red light to turn left. Luckily it was before the SUV hype and i did slide over the car instead of going under. My leg had the blue impression of the bike frame and my fingers had the impression of the brakes that broke in my hands.
During those couple of times i went over my handlebars I was practising ground based movements and i was lucky to be able to just push my body along and get up to a stop. I had decent gloves :)
for those who are interested : Advanced / basic Quadrupedal Patterns
my favorite fall is when i fell onto a soft pile of sand the city left without any visible signs on the quay (? wharf? riverwalk?) to rebuild the bike/walk path. I was riding in the night and suddenly ¼ of my wheel went in the sand and i fell on the floor that was softer than my pillow 😁
“cars and trucks are aiming for us”
As he screams past a dozen cars into a busy 4-way stop without any regard for traffic laws or personal safety
During that same period, the number of recorded e-bike riders seeking medical attention for head trauma increased nearly 50-fold to just shy of 8,000 visits in 2022.
So… Number of ebike riders rose by 50x since 2017. Makes sense, but doesn’t mean it’s more dangerous or anything to do with helmets
I can’t understand why people refuse to wear helmets when riding.
I had a professor in university who got in an accident while not wearing a helmet. He went over the handlebars and landed on his head. It happened years before I met him, but he would regularly get crippling migraines as a consequence, and he would plead with his students to never ride without wearing a helmet.
A friend’s dad fell off his bike hardly moving and had severe brain damage and was a shadow of his former self. Then died young. It doesn’t take much at all. I will never not wear a helmet on a bike.
It’s probably safer to not bike.
should we wear helmets while walking around or jogging? riding a bike at 5mph doesn’t need a helmet. or in the shower? most folks get head trauma from shower falls, far more than bicycle accidents.
helmet wearing is for when you’re going 15mph or faster. it’s for sport cycling.
This is an inherently close minded take on helmets.
If you’re sharing the road with vehicles which can go 30mph, you need a helmet. You don’t need to be moving to be killed on a bike
A helmet won’t stop a car.
A helmet will undoubtedly reduce the incurred injury of a collision or at least increase the threshold of force required for major head injury.
At the end of the day, the only thing which really matters is protecting your head. Limbs are a bonus
