On Thu, 2004-05-20 at 10:39, Mark Lewis wrote:
> Compare Florida, a helmet state, with Iowa, a no-helmet state.
> Florida has a beautiful, year-round riding season. Iowa has a long,
> brutal winter. Yet Iowa has more than three times the number of
First, it is considered good form, not to mention illegal not to, to
provide an attribution to your copy-paste.
Another interesting statistic:
Iowa ppl per sq mi: 52
Fla ppl per sq mi: 296
Cal ppl per sq mi: 217
nat'l avg: 79
(2000 US census)
And, whomever you took this from got Florida wrong, you can ride
helmetless as long as you're carrying extra insurance.
> otherwise. During the seven-year period from 1987 thruogh 1993,
> states with no helmet laws or partial laws (for riders under 21)
> suffered fewer deaths (2.89) per 100 accidents than those with full
> helmet laws (2.93 deaths).
For this to be persuasive you'd want to show several things:
population density in each state, # of registered
motorcyclists/motorcycles, # of registered car drivers/cars, number of
MSF certified riders. Incomplete statistical analysis is great fun to
ignore.
> How can this be true? Is it possible that helmets don't work? Go to a
> motorcycle shop and examine a Department-of-Transportation approved
> helmet. Look deep into its comforting plush lining, and hidden amidst
> the soft fuzz you'll find a warning label: "Some reasonably
> forseeable impacts may exceed the helmet's capability to protect
> against severe injury or death."
Hello?! Does somebody need to slap the same sticker on the author's
forehead as well? Of course the helmet isn't going to protect you for
*all* foreseeable impacts! Neither is your head!
> A typical
> motorcycle accident, however, would be a biker traveling at, say 30
> mph, and being struck by a car making a left turn at, maybe 15 mph.
> That's an effective cumulative impact of 45 mph. Assume the biker is
> helmet-clad, and he is struct directly on the head. The helmet
> reduces the blow to an impact of 31.34 mph.
Again, this is a nice dodge around using any physics to accurately
describe an impact (and since when was t-boning a car turning left at
15mph, equal 45mph??? high school physics, anyone?). What he doesn't say
(for a good reason, probably because he wears a "DOT" beanie) is that
the most all name brand helmets are both SNELL and DOT certified, and
that a certification only describes A MINIMUM. Any helmet manufacturer
is free to make a helmet that far exceeds the ceritification test, there
is no law against it, and most dual cert helmets probably exceed the DOT
tests.
As per the Hurt report, the median crash speed is ~20mph.
> Still enough to kill him. The collisions that helmets cushion
> effectively - say, 7 mph motorcycles with 7 mph cars - are not only
> rare, but eminently avoidable.
Again, he makes another nice, unsaid assumption, that motorcyclist is
able to avoid the accident. Unfortunately, as the Hurt report points
out, alcohol plays a part in nearly 50% of motorcycle accidents. And
whereas a 7mph collision with a helmet is emminently survivable, I doubt
the same can be said whilst helmetless.
> . Goldstein found that helmets begin
> to increase one's chances of a fatal neck injury at speeds exceeding
> 13 mph, about the same impact at which helmets can no longer soak up
> kinetic energy. For this reason, Dr. Charles Campbell, a Chicago
> heart surgeon who performs more than 300 operations per year and
> rides his dark-violet, chopped Harley Softail to work at Micheal
> Reese Hospital, refuses to wear a helmet. "Your head may be saved,"
> says Campbell, " but your neck will be broken."
This is an interesting argument. While I agree that the physics of
helmet wearing do cause complications, the author doesn't speak of the
survivablity of either head or neck injuries. Look at this way: if neck
injuries were 10x less survivable, then yes, one might agree that riding
helmetless had survivablity advantages. BUT I would imagine that a head
injury would be less survivable due to the fact that it's large,
contains a shitload of very complicated organs and nerves and sticks out
at the end of your body. Either way, he doesn't make any argument for
why a head injury is any better than a neck injury, so the "head safe,
neck broken" argument has no weight.
> John G. U. Adams, of University College, London, cites another reason
> not to wear a helmet. He found that helmet wearing can lead to
> excessive risk taking due to the unrealistic sense of invulnerability
> that a motorcyclist feels when he dons a helmet.
It's called stupidity. And retarded ABATE riders suffer from the same
symptom. Again, a great slight of hand by the author.
What I find complete hysterical about this article is that the author
cites an example (hitting a left turning car) and how a helmet will only
reduce the impact by 15mph BUT he never talks about the same impact
without a helmet! WTF! In that situation, I doubt he could pull any
retarded ABATE arguments out of his ass:
*"But without a helmet, I would have seen the car and avoided the
accident"
Yeah, and that last shot of Jager you did at bar is helping you out as
well.
*"Without a helmet, I can jump off the bike and roll out of the
accident"
please see accident: an unforeseen and unplanned event or circumstance,
it's kinda hard to jump off a bike and roll when you don't know you're
supposed to, isn't it?
*"But a helmet causes neck injuries!"
Fine, I'll keep my neck injuries and you can have your:
massive brain trauma
hamburger face
lack of jaw
caved in skull
lack of: eyes/ears/nose/lips/chin/cheekbones/forehead/scalp/teeth
eating out of a straw for the rest of your life
I support people's right to ride helmetless. But I really hate it when
it's backed up with pseudo science and misleading statistics.
Tell you what, find me an ABATEr who'll go head to head with me. The
test will be to slam our heads into a wall at 14 mph, me with helmet,
him w/o. After that, we'll have another test, our respective noggins get
dragged across pavement at 30mph. Any takers? I didn't think so.
Z
DC
A5X
A12X
jim