How dangerous is cycling without a helmet?
Posted: August 20, 2010 by Liam H, Category:Sustainability
Image Credit *Sally M* Under Creative Commons
IES runs a Cycle to Work scheme, I have taken the opportunity to buy two bikes through the scheme and I now cycle to work pretty much every day. After getting hit riding to work on my bike by a white van the one thing that pretty much everyone asked me is why don’t you wear a helmet.
The website http://cyclehelmets.org/ gives some good information on the helmet use for cycling. The data in this blog is taken from that website.
People’s view on the relative risk of cycling is far off the mark. It is viewed as very risky to mix bicycles with motor vehicles but the data shows a different story.
Data giving risk relative to cycling based on fatality rates per participant in the UK shows perhaps unsurprisingly that you are you are 137 times as likely to die climbing as cycling. Horse riding is also more risky, you are 29 times more likely to die. More surprising though is the risk of tennis and football. You are 4.2 times as likely to die playing tennis as cycling, for football the figure is 4.9 times. Golf is safer though, only 0.83 times as likely to die as compared to cycling.
In the US there has been studies done on risk per time doing an activity which shows that you get 0.26 fatalities per million hours of cycling. As I my commute is about 1hour a day I reckon it will take a while for me to reach a million hours of cycling.
Fatalities per million hours for other activities run at:
0.027 fatalities per million hours of living at home
0.15 fatalities per million hours of flying
0.26 fatalities per million hours of cycling
0.47 fatalities per million hours of passenger car use
1.07 fatalities per million hours of swimming
1.53 fatalities per million hours of living (all causes of death)
8.8 fatalities per million hours of on-road motorcycling
128.71 fatalities per million hours of sky diving
So cycling is 10 times more dangerous than being in your own home but it is 6 times safer than what people do with their time on average. That sounds to me as if cycling is not dangerous at all.
The department of health have some statistics for the amount of head injuries for hospital admission the 2002/2003 period.
Proportion of all injuries that involve head injury:
All causes: 34.2%
Cyclists: 37.6%
Pedestrians: 43.7%
So cyclists being admitted to hospital are only slightly more at risk of a head injury than the average of all accidents and less likely to have a head injury than pedestrians.
The Highway Code in the UK advises the use of helmets without making it a law. There is much debate with many non-cyclists to make helmet use law but I feel this would be a mistake. In countries where helmet use is made law there has been a drop off in the number of people cycling. Western Australia saw a 26% to 38% drop in overall cycle use but in children this rose to more than a 50% drop. British Columbia in Canada saw a 28% drop in cycle use after their cycle helmet law was introduced. Melbourne, Australia has invested in a bike hire scheme as Paris and London have done. In Melbourne the bicycles lie in their dock stations unhired because of the helmet laws. Who is going to carry a helmet with them just in case they want to hire one of the cities bicycles? The only other option is to wheel the hired bike to a cycle shop to purchase a helmet.
By the way when I got hit by the van I didn’t hit my head. My ribs were hurt though. Plus helmets ruin my hairdo. I rest my case 
For more blogs on cycling laws see Treehugger and for more on this debate see Planet Green.
