THE CASE FOR A MANDATORY CYCLE HELMET LAW (IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA)

THE CASE FOR A MANDATORY CYCLE HELMET LAW (IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA)


by Andre Jute

It is a risible myth that your average American is a tall-walking free 
individual untrammeled by government: he is in fact just as much 
constricted as a European soft-socialist consumerist or Japanese 
collective citizen, though it is true that the American is controlled 
in different areas of his activity than the European or the Japanese. 
To some the uncontrolled areas of American life, for instance the 
ability to own and use firearms, smacks of barbarism rather than 
liberty. In this article I examine whether the lack of a mandatory 
bicycle helmet law in the USA is barbaric or an emanation of that 
rugged liberty more evident in rhetoric than reality.

Any case for intervention by the state must be made on moral and 
statistical grounds. Examples are driving licences, crush zones on 
cars, seatbelts, age restrictions on alcohol sales, and a million 
other interventions, all now accepted unremarked in the States as part 
of the regulatory landscape, but all virulently opposed in their day.

HOW DANGEROUS IS CYCLING?

Surprisingly, cycling can be argued to be "safe enough", given only 
that one is willing to count the intangible benefits of health through 
exercise, generally acknowledged as substantial. Here I shall make no 
effort to quantify those health benefits because the argument I'm 
putting forward is conclusively made by harder statistics and 
unexceptional general morality.

In the representative year of 2008, the last for which comprehesive 
data is available, 716 cyclists died on US roads, and 52,000 were 
injured.

Source: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration

The most convenient way to grasp the meaning of these statistics is to 
compare cycling with motoring, the latter ipso facto by motorists' 
average mileage accepted by most Americans as safe enough.

Compared to a motorist a cyclist is:

11 times MORE likely to die PER MILE travelled 

2.9 times MORE likely to die PER TRIP taken

By adding information about the relative frequency/length/duration of 
journeys of cyclists and motorists, we can further conclude that in 
the US:

Compared to a motorist, a cyclist is:

3 to 4 times MORE likely to die PER HOUR riding 

3 to 4 times LESS likely to die IN A YEAR's riding

Source: 
http://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=htt...ite/Banco/7man...

It is the last number, that the average cyclist is 3 to 4 times less 
likely to die in a year's riding than a motorist, and enjoys all the 
benefits of healthy exercise, that permits us to ignore the greater 
per mile/per trip/per hour danger.

This gives us the overall perspective but says nothing about wearing a 
cycling helmet.

HELMET WEAR AT THE EXTREME END OF CYCLING RISK
What we really want to know is: what chance of the helmet saving your 
life? The authorities in New York made a compilation covering the 
years 1996 to 2003 of all the deaths (225) and serious injuries 
(3,462) in cycling accidents in all New York City. The purpose of the 
study was an overview usable for city development planning, not helmet 
advocacy, so helmet usage was only noted for part of the period among 
the seriously injured, amounting to 333 cases.

Here are some 
conclusions:
• Most fatal crashes (74%) involved a head injury.
fatal crashes, but 13% in non-fatal 
crashes
Source: 
http://www.nyc.gov/html/doh/download...ike-report.pdf
This concatenation of facts suggests very strongly that not wearing a 
helmet may be particularly dangerous.
• It looks like wearing a helmet saved roundabout 33 cyclists or so 
(of the 333 seriously injured for whom helmet use is known) from 
dying.

• If those who died wore helmets at the same rate of 13% as those in 
the study who survived, a further 22 or so could have lived. 

• If all the fatalities had been wearing a helmet (100%), somewhere 
between 10% and 57% of them would have lived. This number is less firm 
to allow for impacts so heavy that no helmet would have saved the 
cyclist. Still, between 22 and 128 *additional* (to the 33 noted 
above) New Yorkers alive rather than dead for wearing a thirty buck 
helmet is a serious statistical, moral and political consideration 
difficult to overlook.

SO HOW MANY CYCLISTS CAN HELMETS SAVE ACROSS THE NATION? 
New York is not the United States but we're not seeking certainly, 
only investigating whether a moral imperative for action appears.

First off, the 52,000 cyclists hurt cannot be directly related to the 
very serious injuries which were the only ones counted in the New York 
compilation. But a fatality is a fatality anywhere and the fraction of 
head injuries in the fatalities is pretty constant.

So, with a caution, we can say that of 716 cycling fatalities 
nationwide, helmet use could have saved at least 70 and very likely 
more towards a possible upper limit of around 400. Again the 
statistical extension must be tempered by the knowledge that some 
impacts are so heavy that no helmet can save the cyclist. Still, if 
even half the impacts resulting in fatal head trauma is too heavy for 
a helmet to mitigate, possibly around 235 cyclists might live rather 
than die on the roads for simply wearing a helmet. Every year. That's 
an instant reduction in cyclist road fatalities of one third. Once 
more we have arrived at a statistical, moral and political fact that 
is hard to igno Helmet wear could save many lives.

THE CASE AGAINST MANDATORY HELMET LAWS
• Compulsion is anti-Constitutional, an assault on the freedom of the 
citizen to choose his own manner of living and dying 

• Many other actitivities cause fatal head injuries. So why not insist 
they should all be put in helmets?
• 37% of bicycle fatalities involve alcohol, and 23% were legally 
drunk, and you'll never get these drunks in helmets anyway 

• We should leave the drunks to their fate; they're not real cyclists 
anyway

• Helmets are not perfect anyway

• Helmets cause cyclists to stop cycling, which is a cost to society 
in health losses

• Many more motorists die on the roads than cyclists. Why not insist 
that motorists wear helmets inside their cars?

• Helmets don't save lives -- that's a myth put forward by commercial 
helmet makers

• Helmets are too heavily promoted 

• Helmet makers overstate the benefits of helmets 

• A helmet makes me look like a dork 

• Too few cyclists will be saved to make the cost worthwhile

THE CASE FOR A MANDATORY HELMET LAW IN THE STATES

• 235 or more additional cyclists' lives saved 

• 716 deaths of cyclists on the road when a third or more of those 
deaths can easily be avoided is a national disgrace

• Education has clearly failed 

• Anti-helmet zealots in the face of the evidence from New York are 
still advising cyclists not to wear helmets 

• An example to the next generation of cyclists

• A visible sign of a commitment to cycling safety, which may attract 
more people to cycling

© Copyright Andre Jute 2010, 2012, 2020. Free for reproduction in non-profit 
journals and sites as long as the entire article is reproduced in full 
including this copyright and permission notice.
..

On 11/19/2020 7:48 PM, Andre Jute wrote:
THE CASE FOR A MANDATORY CYCLE HELMET LAW (IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA)


by Andre Jute

It is a risible myth that your average American is a tall-walking free 
individual untrammeled by government: he is in fact just as much 
constricted as a European soft-socialist consumerist or Japanese 
collective citizen, though it is true that the American is controlled 
in different areas of his activity than the European or the Japanese. 
To some the uncontrolled areas of American life, for instance the 
ability to own and use firearms, smacks of barbarism rather than 
liberty. In this article I examine whether the lack of a mandatory 
bicycle helmet law in the USA is barbaric or an emanation of that 
rugged liberty more evident in rhetoric than reality.

Any case for intervention by the state must be made on moral and 
statistical grounds. Examples are driving licences, crush zones on 
cars, seatbelts, age restrictions on alcohol sales, and a million 
other interventions, all now accepted unremarked in the States as part 
of the regulatory landscape, but all virulently opposed in their day.

HOW DANGEROUS IS CYCLING?

Surprisingly, cycling can be argued to be "safe enough", given only 
that one is willing to count the intangible benefits of health through 
exercise, generally acknowledged as substantial. Here I shall make no 
effort to quantify those health benefits because the argument I'm 
putting forward is conclusively made by harder statistics and 
unexceptional general morality.

In the representative year of 2008, the last for which comprehesive 
data is available, 716 cyclists died on US roads, and 52,000 were 
injured.

Source: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration

The most convenient way to grasp the meaning of these statistics is to 
compare cycling with motoring, the latter ipso facto by motorists' 
average mileage accepted by most Americans as safe enough.

Compared to a motorist a cyclist is:

11 times MORE likely to die PER MILE travelled 

2.9 times MORE likely to die PER TRIP taken

By adding information about the relative frequency/length/duration of 
journeys of cyclists and motorists, we can further conclude that in 
the US:

Compared to a motorist, a cyclist is:

3 to 4 times MORE likely to die PER HOUR riding 

3 to 4 times LESS likely to die IN A YEAR's riding

Source: 
http://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=htt...ite/Banco/7man...

It is the last number, that the average cyclist is 3 to 4 times less 
likely to die in a year's riding than a motorist, and enjoys all the 
benefits of healthy exercise, that permits us to ignore the greater 
per mile/per trip/per hour danger.

This gives us the overall perspective but says nothing about wearing a 
cycling helmet.

HELMET WEAR AT THE EXTREME END OF CYCLING RISK
What we really want to know is: what chance of the helmet saving your 
life? The authorities in New York made a compilation covering the 
years 1996 to 2003 of all the deaths (225) and serious injuries 
(3,462) in cycling accidents in all New York City. The purpose of the 
study was an overview usable for city development planning, not helmet 
advocacy, so helmet usage was only noted for part of the period among 
the seriously injured, amounting to 333 cases.

Here are some 
conclusions:
• Most fatal crashes (74%) involved a head injury.
fatal crashes, but 13% in non-fatal 
crashes
Source: 
http://www.nyc.gov/html/doh/download...ike-report.pdf
This concatenation of facts suggests very strongly that not wearing a 
helmet may be particularly dangerous.
• It looks like wearing a helmet saved roundabout 33 cyclists or so 
(of the 333 seriously injured for whom helmet use is known) from 
dying.

• If those who died wore helmets at the same rate of 13% as those in 
the study who survived, a further 22 or so could have lived. 

• If all the fatalities had been wearing a helmet (100%), somewhere 
between 10% and 57% of them would have lived. This number is less firm 
to allow for impacts so heavy that no helmet would have saved the 
cyclist. Still, between 22 and 128 *additional* (to the 33 noted 
above) New Yorkers alive rather than dead for wearing a thirty buck 
helmet is a serious statistical, moral and political consideration 
difficult to overlook.

SO HOW MANY CYCLISTS CAN HELMETS SAVE ACROSS THE NATION? 
New York is not the United States but we're not seeking certainly, 
only investigating whether a moral imperative for action appears.

First off, the 52,000 cyclists hurt cannot be directly related to the 
very serious injuries which were the only ones counted in the New York 
compilation. But a fatality is a fatality anywhere and the fraction of 
head injuries in the fatalities is pretty constant.

So, with a caution, we can say that of 716 cycling fatalities 
nationwide, helmet use could have saved at least 70 and very likely 
more towards a possible upper limit of around 400. Again the 
statistical extension must be tempered by the knowledge that some 
impacts are so heavy that no helmet can save the cyclist. Still, if 
even half the impacts resulting in fatal head trauma is too heavy for 
a helmet to mitigate, possibly around 235 cyclists might live rather 
than die on the roads for simply wearing a helmet. Every year. That's 
an instant reduction in cyclist road fatalities of one third. Once 
more we have arrived at a statistical, moral and political fact that 
is hard to igno Helmet wear could save many lives.

THE CASE AGAINST MANDATORY HELMET LAWS
• Compulsion is anti-Constitutional, an assault on the freedom of the 
citizen to choose his own manner of living and dying 

• Many other actitivities cause fatal head injuries. So why not insist 
they should all be put in helmets?
• 37% of bicycle fatalities involve alcohol, and 23% were legally 
drunk, and you'll never get these drunks in helmets anyway 

• We should leave the drunks to their fate; they're not real cyclists 
anyway

• Helmets are not perfect anyway

• Helmets cause cyclists to stop cycling, which is a cost to society 
in health losses

• Many more motorists die on the roads than cyclists. Why not insist 
that motorists wear helmets inside their cars?

• Helmets don't save lives -- that's a myth put forward by commercial 
helmet makers

• Helmets are too heavily promoted 

• Helmet makers overstate the benefits of helmets 

• A helmet makes me look like a dork 

• Too few cyclists will be saved to make the cost worthwhile

THE CASE FOR A MANDATORY HELMET LAW IN THE STATES

• 235 or more additional cyclists' lives saved 

• 716 deaths of cyclists on the road when a third or more of those 
deaths can easily be avoided is a national disgrace

• Education has clearly failed 

• Anti-helmet zealots in the face of the evidence from New York are 
still advising cyclists not to wear helmets 

• An example to the next generation of cyclists

• A visible sign of a commitment to cycling safety, which may attract 
more people to cycling

© Copyright Andre Jute 2010, 2012, 2020. Free for reproduction in non-profit 
journals and sites as long as the entire article is reproduced in full 
including this copyright and permission notice.
.



That's probably Item $#379 on the communist agenda.
Let's hope that and related assaults on liberty do not ever
come to pass.

--
Andrew Muzi
www.yellowjersey.org/
Open every day since 1 April, 1971

On Friday, November 20, 2020 at 2:04:36 AM UTC, AMuzi wrote:
On 11/19/2020 7:48 PM, Andre Jute wrote:
THE CASE FOR A MANDATORY CYCLE HELMET LAW (IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA)


by Andre Jute

It is a risible myth that your average American is a tall-walking free 
individual untrammeled by government: he is in fact just as much 
constricted as a European soft-socialist consumerist or Japanese 
collective citizen, though it is true that the American is controlled 
in different areas of his activity than the European or the Japanese. 
To some the uncontrolled areas of American life, for instance the 
ability to own and use firearms, smacks of barbarism rather than 
liberty. In this article I examine whether the lack of a mandatory 
bicycle helmet law in the USA is barbaric or an emanation of that 
rugged liberty more evident in rhetoric than reality.

Any case for intervention by the state must be made on moral and 
statistical grounds. Examples are driving licences, crush zones on 
cars, seatbelts, age restrictions on alcohol sales, and a million 
other interventions, all now accepted unremarked in the States as part 
of the regulatory landscape, but all virulently opposed in their day.

HOW DANGEROUS IS CYCLING?

Surprisingly, cycling can be argued to be "safe enough", given only 
that one is willing to count the intangible benefits of health through 
exercise, generally acknowledged as substantial. Here I shall make no 
effort to quantify those health benefits because the argument I'm 
putting forward is conclusively made by harder statistics and 
unexceptional general morality.

In the representative year of 2008, the last for which comprehesive 
data is available, 716 cyclists died on US roads, and 52,000 were 
injured.

Source: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration

The most convenient way to grasp the meaning of these statistics is to 
compare cycling with motoring, the latter ipso facto by motorists' 
average mileage accepted by most Americans as safe enough.

Compared to a motorist a cyclist is:

11 times MORE likely to die PER MILE travelled 

2.9 times MORE likely to die PER TRIP taken

By adding information about the relative frequency/length/duration of 
journeys of cyclists and motorists, we can further conclude that in 
the US:

Compared to a motorist, a cyclist is:

3 to 4 times MORE likely to die PER HOUR riding 

3 to 4 times LESS likely to die IN A YEAR's riding

Source: 
http://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=htt...ite/Banco/7man...

It is the last number, that the average cyclist is 3 to 4 times less 
likely to die in a year's riding than a motorist, and enjoys all the 
benefits of healthy exercise, that permits us to ignore the greater 
per mile/per trip/per hour danger.

This gives us the overall perspective but says nothing about wearing a 
cycling helmet.

HELMET WEAR AT THE EXTREME END OF CYCLING RISK
What we really want to know is: what chance of the helmet saving your 
life? The authorities in New York made a compilation covering the 
years 1996 to 2003 of all the deaths (225) and serious injuries 
(3,462) in cycling accidents in all New York City. The purpose of the 
study was an overview usable for city development planning, not helmet 
advocacy, so helmet usage was only noted for part of the period among 
the seriously injured, amounting to 333 cases.

Here are some 
conclusions:
• Most fatal crashes (74%) involved a head injury.
fatal crashes, but 13% in non-fatal 
crashes
Source: 
http://www.nyc.gov/html/doh/download...ike-report.pdf
This concatenation of facts suggests very strongly that not wearing a 
helmet may be particularly dangerous.
• It looks like wearing a helmet saved roundabout 33 cyclists or so 
(of the 333 seriously injured for whom helmet use is known) from 
dying.

• If those who died wore helmets at the same rate of 13% as those in 
the study who survived, a further 22 or so could have lived. 

• If all the fatalities had been wearing a helmet (100%), somewhere 
between 10% and 57% of them would have lived. This number is less firm 
to allow for impacts so heavy that no helmet would have saved the 
cyclist. Still, between 22 and 128 *additional* (to the 33 noted 
above) New Yorkers alive rather than dead for wearing a thirty buck 
helmet is a serious statistical, moral and political consideration 
difficult to overlook.

SO HOW MANY CYCLISTS CAN HELMETS SAVE ACROSS THE NATION? 
New York is not the United States but we're not seeking certainly, 
only investigating whether a moral imperative for action appears.

First off, the 52,000 cyclists hurt cannot be directly related to the 
very serious injuries which were the only ones counted in the New York 
compilation. But a fatality is a fatality anywhere and the fraction of 
head injuries in the fatalities is pretty constant.

So, with a caution, we can say that of 716 cycling fatalities 
nationwide, helmet use could have saved at least 70 and very likely 
more towards a possible upper limit of around 400.. Again the 
statistical extension must be tempered by the knowledge that some 
impacts are so heavy that no helmet can save the cyclist. Still, if 
even half the impacts resulting in fatal head trauma is too heavy for 
a helmet to mitigate, possibly around 235 cyclists might live rather 
than die on the roads for simply wearing a helmet. Every year. That's 
an instant reduction in cyclist road fatalities of one third. Once 
more we have arrived at a statistical, moral and political fact that 
is hard to igno Helmet wear could save many lives.

THE CASE AGAINST MANDATORY HELMET LAWS
• Compulsion is anti-Constitutional, an assault on the freedom of the 
citizen to choose his own manner of living and dying 

• Many other actitivities cause fatal head injuries.. So why not insist 
they should all be put in helmets?
• 37% of bicycle fatalities involve alcohol, and 23% were legally 
drunk, and you'll never get these drunks in helmets anyway 

• We should leave the drunks to their fate; they're not real cyclists 
anyway

• Helmets are not perfect anyway

• Helmets cause cyclists to stop cycling, which is a cost to society 
in health losses

• Many more motorists die on the roads than cyclists. Why not insist 
that motorists wear helmets inside their cars?

• Helmets don't save lives -- that's a myth put forward by commercial 
helmet makers

• Helmets are too heavily promoted 

• Helmet makers overstate the benefits of helmets 

• A helmet makes me look like a dork 

• Too few cyclists will be saved to make the cost worthwhile

THE CASE FOR A MANDATORY HELMET LAW IN THE STATES

• 235 or more additional cyclists' lives saved 

• 716 deaths of cyclists on the road when a third or more of those 
deaths can easily be avoided is a national disgrace

• Education has clearly failed 

• Anti-helmet zealots in the face of the evidence from New York are 
still advising cyclists not to wear helmets 

• An example to the next generation of cyclists

• A visible sign of a commitment to cycling safety, which may attract 
more people to cycling

© Copyright Andre Jute 2010, 2012, 2020. Free for reproduction in non-profit 
journals and sites as long as the entire article is reproduced in full 
including this copyright and permission notice.
.



That's probably Item $#379 on the communist agenda.
Let's hope that and related assaults on liberty do not ever
come to pass.

--
Andrew Muzi
www.yellowjersey.org/
Open every day since 1 April, 1971

Today the communists, judging by the American Marxists in the House of Representatives in DC and the clowns on RBT, are no more sophisticated than Dzerzhnisky's Cheka. When they win power -- possibly as soon as Horselaught Harris becomes Madame President -- the first thing they'll take will be your phone, fax, telex and all other forms of communication -- same as Dzerzhinsk did. Obviously firearms will also be confiscated, but in the second wave of repression, because the commies will, correctly, dismiss the conservatives' willingness and ability to organise and effect Resistance.

Andre Jute
Every revolution is different in it's middle stage, at least the one I've been in, but they all end the same way

On Thursday, November 19, 2020 at 5:48:58 PM UTC-8, Andre Jute wrote:
THE CASE FOR A MANDATORY CYCLE HELMET LAW (IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA)

by Andre Jute

It is a risible myth that your average American is a tall-walking free individual untrammeled by government: he is in fact just as much constricted as a European soft-socialist consumerist or Japanese collective citizen, though it is true that the American is controlled in different areas of his activity than the European or the Japanese. To some the uncontrolled areas of American life, for instance the ability to own and use firearms, smacks of barbarism rather than liberty. In this article I examine whether the lack of a mandatory bicycle helmet law in the USA is barbaric or an emanation of that rugged liberty more evident in rhetoric than reality.

Any case for intervention by the state must be made on moral and statistical grounds. Examples are driving licences, crush zones on cars, seatbelts, age restrictions on alcohol sales, and a million other interventions, all now accepted unremarked in the States as part of the regulatory landscape, but all virulently opposed in their day.

HOW DANGEROUS IS CYCLING?
Surprisingly, cycling can be argued to be "safe enough", given only that one is willing to count the intangible benefits of health through exercise, generally acknowledged as substantial. Here I shall make no effort to quantify those health benefits because the argument I'm putting forward is conclusively made by harder statistics and unexceptional general morality.

In the representative year of 2008, the last for which comprehesive data is available, 716 cyclists died on US roads, and 52,000 were injured.

Source: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration

The most convenient way to grasp the meaning of these statistics is to compare cycling with motoring, the latter ipso facto by motorists' average mileage accepted by most Americans as safe enough.

Compared to a motorist a cyclist is:
11 times MORE likely to die PER MILE travelled
2.9 times MORE likely to die PER TRIP taken

By adding information about the relative frequency/length/duration of journeys of cyclists and motorists, we can further conclude that in the US:

Compared to a motorist, a cyclist is:
3 to 4 times MORE likely to die PER HOUR riding
3 to 4 times LESS likely to die IN A YEAR's riding

Source: http://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=htt...ite/Banco/7man...

It is the last number, that the average cyclist is 3 to 4 times less likely to die in a year's riding than a motorist, and enjoys all the benefits of healthy exercise, that permits us to ignore the greater per mile/per trip/per hour danger.

This gives us the overall perspective but says nothing about wearing a cycling helmet.

HELMET WEAR AT THE EXTREME END OF CYCLING RISK
What we really want to know is: what chance of the helmet saving your life? The authorities in New York made a compilation covering the years 1996 to 2003 of all the deaths (225) and serious injuries (3,462) in cycling accidents in all New York City. The purpose of the study was an overview usable for city development planning, not helmet advocacy, so helmet usage was only noted for part of the period among the seriously injured, amounting to 333 cases.

Here are some conclusions:
• Most fatal crashes (74%) involved a head injury.
fatal crashes, but 13% in non-fatal crashes
Source: http://www.nyc.gov/html/doh/download...ike-report.pdf
This concatenation of facts suggests very strongly that not wearing a helmet may be particularly dangerous.
• It looks like wearing a helmet saved roundabout 33 cyclists or so (of the 333 seriously injured for whom helmet use is known) from dying.
• If those who died wore helmets at the same rate of 13% as those in the study who survived, a further 22 or so could have lived.
• If all the fatalities had been wearing a helmet (100%), somewhere between 10% and 57% of them would have lived. This number is less firm to allow for impacts so heavy that no helmet would have saved the cyclist. Still, between 22 and 128 *additional* (to the 33 noted above) New Yorkers alive rather than dead for wearing a thirty buck helmet is a serious statistical, moral and political consideration difficult to overlook.

SO HOW MANY CYCLISTS CAN HELMETS SAVE ACROSS THE NATION? New York is not the United States but we're not seeking certainly, only investigating whether a moral imperative for action appears.

First off, the 52,000 cyclists hurt cannot be directly related to the very serious injuries which were the only ones counted in the New York compilation. But a fatality is a fatality anywhere and the fraction of head injuries in the fatalities is pretty constant.

So, with a caution, we can say that of 716 cycling fatalities nationwide, helmet use could have saved at least 70 and very likely more towards a possible upper limit of around 400. Again the statistical extension must be tempered by the knowledge that some impacts are so heavy that no helmet can save the cyclist. Still, if even half the impacts resulting in fatal head trauma is too heavy for a helmet to mitigate, possibly around 235 cyclists might live rather than die on the roads for simply wearing a helmet. Every year. That's an instant reduction in cyclist road fatalities of one third. Once more we have arrived at a statistical, moral and political fact that is hard to igno Helmet wear could save many lives.

THE CASE AGAINST MANDATORY HELMET LAWS
• Compulsion is anti-Constitutional, an assault on the freedom of the citizen to choose his own manner of living and dying
• Many other actitivities cause fatal head injuries. So why not insist they should all be put in helmets?
• 37% of bicycle fatalities involve alcohol, and 23% were legally drunk, and you'll never get these drunks in helmets anyway
• We should leave the drunks to their fate; they're not real cyclists anyway
• Helmets are not perfect anyway
• Helmets cause cyclists to stop cycling, which is a cost to society in health losses
• Many more motorists die on the roads than cyclists. Why not insist that motorists wear helmets inside their cars?
• Helmets don't save lives -- that's a myth put forward by commercial helmet makers
• Helmets are too heavily promoted
• Helmet makers overstate the benefits of helmets
• A helmet makes me look like a dork
• Too few cyclists will be saved to make the cost worthwhile

THE CASE FOR A MANDATORY HELMET LAW IN THE STATES
• 235 or more additional cyclists' lives saved
• 716 deaths of cyclists on the road when a third or more of those deaths can easily be avoided is a national disgrace
• Education has clearly failed
• Anti-helmet zealots in the face of the evidence from New York are still advising cyclists not to wear helmets
• An example to the next generation of cyclists
• A visible sign of a commitment to cycling safety, which may attract more people to cycling

© Copyright Andre Jute 2010, 2012, 2020. Free for reproduction in non-profit journals and sites as long as the entire article is reproduced in full including this copyright and permission notice.
.
Well, you appear to be concentrating on New York City which might be a slightly different case than the nation at large. But a few criticisms. 1. ALL fatalities have extreme bodily trauma. So head trauma is entirely beside the point. I suppose you might find a case in which only head trauma is the only injury but they would be in almost a singular minority. 2. Helmets in fact are designed specifically to not work. The specifications are to prevent skull fracture and it isn't skull fracture that is the most dangerous injury - it is extreme concussion where the brain is torn loose from its moorings and slammed against the opposite side of the skull. In fact it is thought that a relatively minor skull fracture protects the head from this fatal concussion by reducing the force of a collision. 3. Per mile fatality rates are a very bad way to measure fatality rates but per hour since cars travel at rates a minimum of 10 times faster than bicycles and hence cover more miles between collisions. The AVERAGE distance a driver drives each year is 13,500 miles while at the very high end of a bicyclist mileage are the very unusual coast to coast riders that may do this once in a lifetime. My present 3,200 miles is much higher than most people and last year's 4,000 miles put me in the upper 5% of riders. Prior to 2009 when I received my injury I did three years of 10,000 miles which put me in the top 0.25% of riders in the nation just below professional racers. 4. Most bicycle injuries are NOT from vehicular involvement but road conditions or simple fall-overs in which a helmet may actually increase the chance of injury from the increase weight and size of the head/helmet combination.

So using injuries per mile is a very poor means of measurement. Who is in more danger - someone who commutes from Sacramento to San Francisco (which was NOT uncommon before covid) or someone that bike commutes from Belmont to downtown San Francisco which takes the same amount of time? Or commutes from Mill Valley vs. bike commutes inside the city with has many hills requiring the same time of exposure but at much lower speeds?

On Thursday, November 19, 2020 at 6:25:23 PM UTC-8, Andre Jute wrote:

Today the communists, judging by the American Marxists in the House of Representatives in DC and the clowns on RBT, are no more sophisticated than Dzerzhnisky's Cheka. When they win power -- possibly as soon as Horselaught Harris becomes Madame President -- the first thing they'll take will be your phone, fax, telex and all other forms of communication -- same as Dzerzhinsk did. Obviously firearms will also be confiscated, but in the second wave of repression, because the commies will, correctly, dismiss the conservatives' willingness and ability to organise and effect Resistance.

Andre Jute
Every revolution is different in it's middle stage, at least the one I've been in, but they all end the same way

I believe that the American communists are intent on making the Russian Revolution and Mao's revolution look penny ante. They actually intend to murder almost half of this country's inhabitants. This was the basis of Margaret Sanger's treatise which led to Planned Parenthood - there are too many people and they have to correct that. “Eugenics without birth control seems to us a house builded [sic] upon the sands. It is at the mercy of the rising stream of the unfit.�
-- Sanger, Margaret. (1919) Birth Control and Racial Betterment. The Birth Control Review.

So the Democrats want cheap labor from south of the border but they way to kill the children of these people.

On Friday, November 20, 2020 at 5:01:22 PM UTC, wrote:
On Thursday, November 19, 2020 at 5:48:58 PM UTC-8, Andre Jute wrote:
THE CASE FOR A MANDATORY CYCLE HELMET LAW (IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA)

by Andre Jute

It is a risible myth that your average American is a tall-walking free individual untrammeled by government: he is in fact just as much constricted as a European soft-socialist consumerist or Japanese collective citizen, though it is true that the American is controlled in different areas of his activity than the European or the Japanese. To some the uncontrolled areas of American life, for instance the ability to own and use firearms, smacks of barbarism rather than liberty. In this article I examine whether the lack of a mandatory bicycle helmet law in the USA is barbaric or an emanation of that rugged liberty more evident in rhetoric than reality.

Any case for intervention by the state must be made on moral and statistical grounds. Examples are driving licences, crush zones on cars, seatbelts, age restrictions on alcohol sales, and a million other interventions, all now accepted unremarked in the States as part of the regulatory landscape, but all virulently opposed in their day.

HOW DANGEROUS IS CYCLING?
Surprisingly, cycling can be argued to be "safe enough", given only that one is willing to count the intangible benefits of health through exercise, generally acknowledged as substantial. Here I shall make no effort to quantify those health benefits because the argument I'm putting forward is conclusively made by harder statistics and unexceptional general morality.

In the representative year of 2008, the last for which comprehesive data is available, 716 cyclists died on US roads, and 52,000 were injured.

Source: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration

The most convenient way to grasp the meaning of these statistics is to compare cycling with motoring, the latter ipso facto by motorists' average mileage accepted by most Americans as safe enough.

Compared to a motorist a cyclist is:
11 times MORE likely to die PER MILE travelled
2.9 times MORE likely to die PER TRIP taken

By adding information about the relative frequency/length/duration of journeys of cyclists and motorists, we can further conclude that in the US:

Compared to a motorist, a cyclist is:
3 to 4 times MORE likely to die PER HOUR riding
3 to 4 times LESS likely to die IN A YEAR's riding

Source: http://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=htt...ite/Banco/7man...

It is the last number, that the average cyclist is 3 to 4 times less likely to die in a year's riding than a motorist, and enjoys all the benefits of healthy exercise, that permits us to ignore the greater per mile/per trip/per hour danger.

This gives us the overall perspective but says nothing about wearing a cycling helmet.

HELMET WEAR AT THE EXTREME END OF CYCLING RISK
What we really want to know is: what chance of the helmet saving your life? The authorities in New York made a compilation covering the years 1996 to 2003 of all the deaths (225) and serious injuries (3,462) in cycling accidents in all New York City. The purpose of the study was an overview usable for city development planning, not helmet advocacy, so helmet usage was only noted for part of the period among the seriously injured, amounting to 333 cases.

Here are some conclusions:
• Most fatal crashes (74%) involved a head injury.
fatal crashes, but 13% in non-fatal crashes
Source: http://www.nyc.gov/html/doh/download...ike-report.pdf
This concatenation of facts suggests very strongly that not wearing a helmet may be particularly dangerous.
• It looks like wearing a helmet saved roundabout 33 cyclists or so (of the 333 seriously injured for whom helmet use is known) from dying..
• If those who died wore helmets at the same rate of 13% as those in the study who survived, a further 22 or so could have lived.
• If all the fatalities had been wearing a helmet (100%), somewhere between 10% and 57% of them would have lived. This number is less firm to allow for impacts so heavy that no helmet would have saved the cyclist. Still, between 22 and 128 *additional* (to the 33 noted above) New Yorkers alive rather than dead for wearing a thirty buck helmet is a serious statistical, moral and political consideration difficult to overlook.

SO HOW MANY CYCLISTS CAN HELMETS SAVE ACROSS THE NATION? New York is not the United States but we're not seeking certainly, only investigating whether a moral imperative for action appears.

First off, the 52,000 cyclists hurt cannot be directly related to the very serious injuries which were the only ones counted in the New York compilation. But a fatality is a fatality anywhere and the fraction of head injuries in the fatalities is pretty constant.

So, with a caution, we can say that of 716 cycling fatalities nationwide, helmet use could have saved at least 70 and very likely more towards a possible upper limit of around 400. Again the statistical extension must be tempered by the knowledge that some impacts are so heavy that no helmet can save the cyclist. Still, if even half the impacts resulting in fatal head trauma is too heavy for a helmet to mitigate, possibly around 235 cyclists might live rather than die on the roads for simply wearing a helmet. Every year. That's an instant reduction in cyclist road fatalities of one third. Once more we have arrived at a statistical, moral and political fact that is hard to igno Helmet wear could save many lives.

THE CASE AGAINST MANDATORY HELMET LAWS
• Compulsion is anti-Constitutional, an assault on the freedom of the citizen to choose his own manner of living and dying
• Many other actitivities cause fatal head injuries. So why not insist they should all be put in helmets?
• 37% of bicycle fatalities involve alcohol, and 23% were legally drunk, and you'll never get these drunks in helmets anyway
• We should leave the drunks to their fate; they're not real cyclists anyway
• Helmets are not perfect anyway
• Helmets cause cyclists to stop cycling, which is a cost to society in health losses
• Many more motorists die on the roads than cyclists. Why not insist that motorists wear helmets inside their cars?
• Helmets don't save lives -- that's a myth put forward by commercial helmet makers
• Helmets are too heavily promoted
• Helmet makers overstate the benefits of helmets
• A helmet makes me look like a dork
• Too few cyclists will be saved to make the cost worthwhile

THE CASE FOR A MANDATORY HELMET LAW IN THE STATES
• 235 or more additional cyclists' lives saved
• 716 deaths of cyclists on the road when a third or more of those deaths can easily be avoided is a national disgrace
• Education has clearly failed
• Anti-helmet zealots in the face of the evidence from New York are still advising cyclists not to wear helmets
• An example to the next generation of cyclists
• A visible sign of a commitment to cycling safety, which may attract more people to cycling

© Copyright Andre Jute 2010, 2012, 2020. Free for reproduction in non-profit journals and sites as long as the entire article is reproduced in full including this copyright and permission notice.
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Well, you appear to be concentrating on New York City which might be a slightly different case than the nation at large. But a few criticisms. 1. ALL fatalities have extreme bodily trauma. So head trauma is entirely beside the point. I suppose you might find a case in which only head trauma is the only injury but they would be in almost a singular minority.

Sure. However, the unavoidable, mountainously solid point about the New York report is that it is NOT A STUDY BUT A FULL UNIVERSE COUNT of all bicycle incidents which resulted in an injury serious enough to require a hospital visit over a period of years in a very large city, counted by both police and hospital records kept by a large number of parties who didn't care one way or the other about helmet wear. In short, it is a set of figures with which the Anti-Helmet Zealots know they cannot argue, and so ignore, which fatally undermines everything else they say -- forever.

2. Helmets in fact are designed specifically to not work. The specifications are to prevent skull fracture and it isn't skull fracture that is the most dangerous injury - it is extreme concussion where the brain is torn loose from its moorings and slammed against the opposite side of the skull. In fact it is thought that a relatively minor skull fracture protects the head from this fatal concussion by reducing the force of a collision.

That may or may not be so -- I don't know and I don't care because I wear the helmet to avoid road rash on my face -- but in either case it is irrelevant to my argument because the New York report counts actual fatalities from head trauma with or without a helmet, and the results clearly show that helmets save lives which would otherwise be lost. That's an inarguable case, which is why that report is anathema to the anti-helmet zealots.

3. Per mile fatality rates are a very bad way to measure fatality rates but per hour since cars travel at rates a minimum of 10 times faster than bicycles and hence cover more miles between collisions. The AVERAGE distance a driver drives each year is 13,500 miles while at the very high end of a bicyclist mileage are the very unusual coast to coast riders that may do this once in a lifetime. My present 3,200 miles is much higher than most people and last year's 4,000 miles put me in the upper 5% of riders. Prior to 2009 when I received my injury I did three years of 10,000 miles which put me in the top 0.25% of riders in the nation just below professional racers. 4.. Most bicycle injuries are NOT from vehicular involvement but road conditions or simple fall-overs in which a helmet may actually increase the chance of injury from the increase weight and size of the head/helmet combination..

My final judgement, that the correct figure to work with is that per annum a cyclist is probably between 3 and 4 times LESS likely to die on the road than a motorist, allows for differential total mileage p.a. and differential per trip mileage. This is what I wrote: "It is the last number, that the average cyclist is 3 to 4 times less likely to die in a year's riding than a motorist, and enjoys all the benefits of healthy exercise, that permits us to ignore the greater per mile/per trip/per hour danger." I worked out the other numbers you quote merely to show how ridiculous they are; just because I quote a number doesn't mean I agree with it: you have to read on until I state positively which of several possible numbers I choose and why.

So using injuries per mile is a very poor means of measurement. Who is in more danger - someone who commutes from Sacramento to San Francisco (which was NOT uncommon before covid) or someone that bike commutes from Belmont to downtown San Francisco which takes the same amount of time? Or commutes from Mill Valley vs. bike commutes inside the city with has many hills requiring the same time of exposure but at much lower speeds?

The national numbers from my source are a macrocosmos of cycling in the USA.. Your comparison may be perfectly valid (I don't know -- I don't cycle in California, and I had no reason to go look for San Francisco numbers in particular) but descending into the mire of micro-conditions would only have confused my projection of hard New York numbers onto the hard national numbers by inviting kkklowns like Krygowsky to claim, "That isn't what happens on my block of my suburb of my town in my region of my state on this particular day of leap years." The point of this sort of statistics is to exclude the anti-social kibitzers and the petty-minded bees in their bonnets. I repeat, I'm working, very conservatively, with the only hard numbers, all the hard numbers available, and in both sets my numbers are the only total universe counts, whereas every single bit of so-called "evidence" everyone else brings is from a tiny "study" usually conducted by biased clowns proving some politico-lobbying preconception.

Andre Jute
Statistics in the right hands can be one of the most fulfilling of the mathematical sciences,

On Friday, November 20, 2020 at 5:10:03 PM UTC, wrote:
On Thursday, November 19, 2020 at 6:25:23 PM UTC-8, Andre Jute wrote:

Today the communists, judging by the American Marxists in the House of Representatives in DC and the clowns on RBT, are no more sophisticated than Dzerzhnisky's Cheka. When they win power -- possibly as soon as Horselaught Harris becomes Madame President -- the first thing they'll take will be your phone, fax, telex and all other forms of communication -- same as Dzerzhinsk did. Obviously firearms will also be confiscated, but in the second wave of repression, because the commies will, correctly, dismiss the conservatives' willingness and ability to organise and effect Resistance.

Andre Jute
Every revolution is different in it's middle stage, at least the one I've been in, but they all end the same way
I believe that the American communists are intent on making the Russian Revolution and Mao's revolution look penny ante. They actually intend to murder almost half of this country's inhabitants.
..
That's the point of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's "List of Enemies".
..
This was the basis of Margaret Sanger's treatise which led to Planned Parenthood - there are too many people and they have to correct that. “Eugenics without birth control seems to us a house builded [sic] upon the sands. It is at the mercy of the rising stream of the unfit.�
-- Sanger, Margaret. (1919) Birth Control and Racial Betterment. The Birth Control Review.
..
Demographics is Destiny, for sure.
..
So the Democrats want cheap labor from south of the border but they way to kill the children of these people.
..
Seems a bit wasteful.
..
Andre Jute
Definitely not a eugenicist. In fact, I don't even believe in Darwin any more -- mathematically, there just wasn't time for random selection to work..

On Friday, November 20, 2020 at 4:59:20 PM UTC-8, Andre Jute wrote:
On Friday, November 20, 2020 at 5:10:03 PM UTC, wrote:
On Thursday, November 19, 2020 at 6:25:23 PM UTC-8, Andre Jute wrote:

Today the communists, judging by the American Marxists in the House of Representatives in DC and the clowns on RBT, are no more sophisticated than Dzerzhnisky's Cheka. When they win power -- possibly as soon as Horselaught Harris becomes Madame President -- the first thing they'll take will be your phone, fax, telex and all other forms of communication -- same as Dzerzhinsk did. Obviously firearms will also be confiscated, but in the second wave of repression, because the commies will, correctly, dismiss the conservatives' willingness and ability to organise and effect Resistance.

Andre Jute
Every revolution is different in it's middle stage, at least the one I've been in, but they all end the same way
I believe that the American communists are intent on making the Russian Revolution and Mao's revolution look penny ante. They actually intend to murder almost half of this country's inhabitants.
.
That's the point of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's "List of Enemies".
.
This was the basis of Margaret Sanger's treatise which led to Planned Parenthood - there are too many people and they have to correct that. “Eugenics without birth control seems to us a house builded [sic] upon the sands. It is at the mercy of the rising stream of the unfit.�
-- Sanger, Margaret. (1919) Birth Control and Racial Betterment. The Birth Control Review.
.
Demographics is Destiny, for sure.
.
So the Democrats want cheap labor from south of the border but they way to kill the children of these people.
.
Seems a bit wasteful.
.
Andre Jute
Definitely not a eugenicist. In fact, I don't even believe in Darwin any more -- mathematically, there just wasn't time for random selection to work...
Long ago I came to the conclusion that Darwin's theories only worked in the small scale. DNA mutates at a known rate and from memory only one in 14 mutations doesn't immediately kill its recipient. This is too slow for a single life type to develop and we have had three. Fishes, Dinosaurs and Mammals. You could probably add an age of plants because the original atmosphere on Earth was around 40% CO2 and we had an age of plants that reduced this atmosphere to the present day 410 parts per million. Of course this was largely ocean plankton.

On Friday, November 20, 2020 at 4:49:42 PM UTC-8, Andre Jute wrote:.

Andre Jute
Statistics in the right hands can be one of the most fulfilling of the mathematical sciences,

This is the problem. Just like using injuries or deaths per mile instead of actual exposure time. Using numbers of head injuries etc. compared with those wearing helmets or not is again an entirely incorrect means of measurement. Although this is changing somewhat no, classically bicycle advocates were those that wore helmets and not the run of the mill rider. These people tended to ride far safer (with traffic rather than against it, etc.) and the accidents they did get involved in were invariably at slower speeds and less dangerous. I studied this subject pretty closely since I had been racing motorcycles and was made the safety director of the American Federation of Motorcyclists. So I went to Bell helmets who had manufactured the first helmet standard. The present standard is slightly more demanding but not much. It appears to be more of a metrification of the original standard (instead of a fall of 6 feet bearing ONLY the weight of an average head it became 2 meters.) If you read the standard it is pretty ridiculous. It is virtually impossible to have a crash with only the weight of your head being supported by the helmet etc. The impossibility of any accurate measurements of the energies involved in any general crash makes the statistics unusable. And like I said, until the Trek Q-cell helmet came along, no one was making a helmet that even addressed the major problems of a helmet - the basic design to false premises.

Am 22.11.2020 um 00:25 schrieb Tom Kunich:

Long ago I came to the conclusion that Darwin's theories only worked
in the small scale. DNA mutates at a known rate and from memory only
one in 14 mutations doesn't immediately kill its recipient.

DNA mutations are not at constant speed across all of the genome. In
the process of copying, there are error-correcting mechanism of varying
quality. Amongst mammals with few offspring (like apes), these
error-correcting mechanisms are a lot more fine-turned than amongst
other animals.
So a fish laying a million eggs per year also has a DNA mutation rate a
lot higher than apes, giving a mutation speed amongst fishes of several
million times compared to apes.

Therefore, human DNA is 97% identical to the Chimpansee DNA; I believe
that the path from Chimpansee to human only needed some 5 major
mutations in the brain area, something which is easily achieved within
the 2 million years available.

Due to the fact that mutation is far too slow for fine-tuning higher
animals and plants against bacteria, nature has luckily invented another
mechanism: Sexual reproduction with re-combination. Recombination has a
significantly lower "error rate" than mutation; typically 50% of the
recombined offspring is capable of living. The "recombination error" of
duplicated genes is typically not a major threat becauseit does not
change the protein-building capabilities, it only changes the
probabilities that these genes are going to be expressed.