Posts by Bart Janssen
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Hard News: Fear of Cycling, in reply to Kevin McCready,
Correct me if I'm wrong
You are wrong. Utterly wrong. So wrong you should slap yourself in embarrassment.
You cannot just read an abstract of such a paper and expect to understand what is being said.
The authors build a comprehensive model including all the variables discussed here (and more) and then run the model for a range of assumptions for those variables including estimates of those variables based on data from a bunch of countries.
If you'd actually read the paper you'd know the authors discuss and account for substitution of exercise so your little rant about the paper shouldn't have been published because you thought of something - is just silly especially because you couldn't be bothered reading the paper.
The short conclusion is
Unless you assume helmets completely eliminate head injuries
AND
the law causes a 100% uptake of helmets (from 0 to 100%)
AND
there is no effect on cycling numbers from the lawthen in all cases the model shows a negative health outcome from the helmet law
For all reasonable assessments of the variables in the model (based on data from a range of countries) a helmet law is a massive negative health outcome.
Frankly at this point Kevin you sound like a climate change denier "ooo a mathematical model that can't be any good" as if maths and risk analysis wasn't a real science.
If you can't be bothered reading the literature before you criticise it, you really are just a troll.
Sorry folks this kind of stuff pisses me off and I'm already tired and grumpy so sorry if this come across too strong for the one or two still reading - but I spend way too much time defending science against drivel like Kevin's to have much patience any more. FFS "I didn't read the paper but the authors are still wrong" grrrr.
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Hard News: Fear of Cycling, in reply to Carol Stewart,
So I searched the Cochrane reviews for a complete unbiased meta-analysis, and found two that seem relevant.
Which is fine except that their only assessment is from 2008.
I'm not sure why you are unwilling to accept recent risk analysis work as evidence. The maths is straightforward, unless you make extraordinary assumptions then then cycle helmet laws have a negative public health outcome.
It essentially means this discussion can go no further. Which is fine, I think every opinion and reckon has been shared by now and there are plenty of links to data in this thread now for people to read.
It does seem odd that no one else had hit the Cochrane button :-)
It's not a very useful source outside medical research and definitely not useful for someone used to reading scientific literature directly (providing you have access to that literature) - also my opinion of it is coloured by knowing some of the people who've ended up working there. It does a good job in fields where publications are often ... er ... less well peer-reviewed and it is targeted at a lay audience which is helpful.
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Hard News: Fear of Cycling, in reply to Kevin McCready,
Which study do you think I should read?
Read de jong 2012
It's Australian so very similar to NZ and relatively straightforward analysis. If you want to go further you can dig through papers that it cites and papers that cite it but you'd probably need some academic access.
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Hard News: Fear of Cycling, in reply to linger,
I'm not convinced that repealing the law now would undo the damage anywhere near as quickly. There's causation as well as correlation -- but there's also path-dependence.
Actually I agree.
But, if you view the law as an experiment designed to reduce harm, then it didn't work. Quite spectacularly.
If you view all such laws as experiments, then it really is time to try something different that might work better.
Ideally you'd state what you were aiming to achieve with your new experiment and you'd set in place objective measures that could be used to assess the success or otherwise of any such experiment ...
But that would be like, evidence based policy.
To circle back to the OP one thing you could try would be a campaign to try and encourage more people to cycle and emphasize just how safe and good cycling really is. With the aim of increasing the percentage of cyclists and reducing the rate of accidents (by increasing the number of cyclists). Those are two fairly easy things to measure to test the value of the campaign.
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Hard News: Fear of Cycling, in reply to Kevin McCready,
In my experience the anti-helmet brigade (not necessarily you) are like climate change deniers
Funny you should say that because I find the opposition to getting rid of the law is exactly like CC deniers. It really doesn't matter what data we show you. It really doesn't matter how many scientists who are expert in risk analysis do studies that show helmet laws are bad. Someone will always come back with some anecdote or better yet some irrelevant mechanistic argument about why their view is right.
Quite simply the data is in. Helmet laws result is less safe cycling and poorer health outcomes.
It doesn't matter whether helmets protect your head or not. It doesn't matter if accidents occur at intersections. It doesn't matter if cyclists wear reflective clothing or whether infrastructure is better in one place or another. It doesn't matter if cycling deaths are caused by head injuries or massive whole body trauma - as horrific as those statements might be. None of those things are relevant to the question of the helmet law.
That's like arguing about whether tree rings are an accurate measure of climate when the discussion is actually about climate change.
I'm sorry if this causes offense it really isn't meant that way. I'm NOT a risk analysis scientist - but I'm a good enough scientist to accept when an expert in that field says the helmet law is counterproductive to sit back and listen.
Quite simply our helmet law is causing harm, that's what the experts in risk analysis say, defending that law is wrong.
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Hard News: Fear of Cycling, in reply to Carol Stewart,
Does this account for the nature of the cycling infrastructure?
As Linger said this is kind of moot since infrastructure changes as the number of cyclists increases. There really is no reasonable reason to have laws in place that deter people from cycling and every restriction makes it more dangerous for the cyclists that do persist.
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Hard News: Fear of Cycling, in reply to Mikaere Curtis,
I am still not sure how you prove that re the helmet law " it’s trivial to show that it raises the likelyhood of having a car v bike accident."
There are multiple analyses that show this effect based on the data from NZ and Australia. With the helmet law the number of cyclists reduced as did the number of car v cycle accidents. But the rate of accidents per hour of cycling increased.
In countries without a helmet law as the number of cyclists increases the rate of accidents per hour of cycling decreases.
This really isn't complicated. As Ben says causation is always difficult however the correlation is clear
helmet law decreases the number of cyclists
number of cyclists is inversely proportional to the accident rate
=> helmet law increases accident rateThat correlation is too compelling to ignore, essentially by retaining a helmet law we are causing cyclists to have accidents - even if we don't understand the mechanism*.
However as Linger and multiple articles have pointed out there are so many other benefits from increasing the number of cyclists that any law change that does that is pretty much a slam dunk good thing.
*There are of course several very plausible explanations for the mechanism most of them centered around driver expectations and behaviour, but also the fear tactics used to induce people to wear helmets were extremely successful at discouraging people from cycling at all. -
Hard News: Fear of Cycling, in reply to Mikaere Curtis,
Have you got a link handy ?
Sorry took a while to find the refs again, had lost that old folder in one of the various moves. The journal article I was think of is this one de jong 2012. A discussion of lots of the pros and cons can be found here.
As always needs to be stated in this discussion it is the law that is the problem, helmets are not being questioned.
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Another use for the bell is to let the pedestrian in front of us know that meandering randomly from side to side of the path is causing us a huge amount of stress as we try to guess which side it's safe to pass you on.
How hard is it to walk in a straight line?
This is pretty much a parallel to a comment I made a few years back, if you are using a shared path as a cyclist on the road is - try and be predictable it really helps the other faster users avoid you.
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One thing I have noticed is that it seems less scary with both of us riding. I'm not sure why, but having someone else as a riding buddy seems to both reduce the number of incidents and reduce the fear involved.
Maybe it's as simple as being more visible, maybe it's about being able to share the swearing (shown to reduce stress), maybe it's something more complex about driver behaviour - seeing both of us riding seems to make drivers behave better.