CHAPTER 7

If Bike Helmets Are the Answer, You’re Asking the Wrong Question

Safety Is Everybody’s Business

The bill introduced to Wyoming’s legislature by a Republican member, David Northrup, could be described as extremely thorough in its approach to cyclists’ safety. Anyone riding a bike in the state should have a flashing light at the rear, and carry some photo ID, it said. Oh yes, and be wearing high-visibility clothing in fluorescent orange, pink, or green—visible from the front and back, covering at least two hundred square inches in area.

Some local cycling advocates, however, were a bit less certain. Brian Schilling, who manages a network of cycleways in the Jackson Hole area of the state, said he was largely in favor of cyclists having rear lights. “But the orange vest—I think that’s a little onerous,” he mused. “My five-year-old kid, I don’t think her entire surface area is two hundred inches.”¹

Some months later a representative in another state legislature, Jay Houghton, had his own flash of inspiration. All cyclists wanting to use minor roads in Missouri, his bill decreed, must fly a flag “no less than fifteen feet above the roadway.” Again, bike advocates had their worries, not least that a fifteen-foot flagpole would snag on most bridges, even electricity cables. One St. Louis bike shop bolted a sufficient-length pole and flag to a child’s bicycle and tweeted a photo of the result—an ungainly, top-heavy creation that looked like it would knock over the bike in the slightest breeze. Houghton was not deterred. “My constituents, who drive these roads daily, feel this is a good idea,” he told a local cycling advocacy group. “I believe in freedom, and this bill in no way restricts your freedom to ride on the roads.”²

You could just chuckle and say such proposals, neither of which became law, are little more than the strange goings-on and attention-seeking antics common to many smaller legislatures—in this instance from politicians who simply don’t understand a type of transport that very few of their constituents actually use. Sadly, that’s not all there is to it. Representatives Northrup and Houghton can just as credibly be seen as slight outliers of a very much more mainstream opinion. This contends that cyclists are uniquely responsible for their own safety, and that the use of sufficient high-visibility clothing, along with a cycle helmet, is by far the best and most important way to overcome the disadvantages of unsafe road infrastructure and poor driving. This philosophy, which can be fairly described as blaming the victim, often extends also to pedestrians and to children. It’s so common that surprisingly few people even challenge it.

Take an event a year or so ago at Signhills Academy, a school in Cleethorpes, a small town on the northeast coast of England, where a class of students ages ten and eleven were visited by construction multinational Balfour Beatty. A company representative handed out high-visibility vests, with the exciting news that the child who wore theirs most often in the coming months would win a bicycle. “The vests are really important as children can do strange things on the road and many walk to school,” head teacher Ken Thompson told the local paper. Meanwhile Dave Poucher, the Balfour Beatty senior traffic engineer handing out the vests, said: “We do it to get the message across that safety is everybody’s business, from birth until death.”³

From birth until death. This is astonishing, appalling stuff. Of course, making sure children know roads are dangerous places, and that too many car drivers drive overly fast and don’t always concentrate, is a sad and basic necessity of modern life. With my own son, I try to avoid scaring him about life in general. Motor traffic is the exception. Here, it’s almost hard to overstate the risks.

But why simply accept this? Those “strange things” children do presumably include being impulsive and distracted. In other words, being children. And yet it’s they who are told they must adapt to a hazardous traffic system. A ninety-pound child is seen as facing an almost equal burden of responsibility for traffic safety as does an adult driving a one-ton vehicle. Ken Thompson and Balfour Beatty might have spent their time and effort more productively in agitating for slower and rigidly enforced urban speed limits for cars.

The common rejoinder to all this is for people to say: of course drivers must be careful, but surely everyone else must do what they can. In many ways it’s a fair argument, but it ignores one vital point: it is only roads where we see this supposedly shared culpability.

Airline passengers are not told to wear high-visibility jackets and look carefully for taxiing planes when walking across the airport tarmac to catch a flight. The same Cleethorpes parents who waved their children off to school in high-visibility vests would presumably be aghast if the head teacher suggested the youngsters be drilled from infancy to carefully taste their school lunches and decide if they were okay to eat, as the cooks in the canteen would do their best to not use rotten meat but sometimes just lost concentration and got it wrong.

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Let’s clarify one thing immediately: I don’t object to helmets, or to high-visibility clothing. I wear a helmet most of the time when I’m on a bike. So do most people I know in London. But when it comes to genuine efforts to make cycling safer, they’re a red herring, an irrelevance, a peripheral issue that has somehow come to dominate the argument. You don’t make cycling safe by obliging every rider to dress up as if for urban warfare or to work a shift at a nuclear power station. You do it by creating a road system that insulates them from fast-moving road traffic.

Chris Boardman expressed an eloquent opinion on this when an innocuous appearance on a television news program to discuss bike infrastructure became dominated by angry viewer reactions to him being filmed cycling down a street bare-headed. “I understand exactly why people feel so passionately about helmets or high-vis,” Boardman wrote. “I understand why people wish to use them. But these actions seek to deal with an effect. I want to focus the debate on the cause, and campaign for things that will really make cycling safe. That is why I won’t promote high-vis and helmets—I won’t let the debate be drawn onto a topic that isn’t even in the top ten things that will really keep people who want to cycle safe.”⁴

Boardman is not alone in finding that helmet use provokes strong and strange reactions. Nick Hussey, the founder of a British cycle clothing company, Vulpine, became so perturbed by the vicious social media reaction when his firm’s website featured models on bikes without helmets, he wrote a response for my newspaper’s cycling blog. It began with the parallel of him hypothetically marching into a bar and snatching a third or fourth beer from a random drinker’s lips, yelling, “Stop drinking or you will die!”

“That’s more or less what the infamous helmet debate has become,” Hussey lamented. “Shouty strangers shouting at other shouty strangers for choices that don’t affect the first shouty stranger’s life. It’s a bit weird, definitely a waste of energy, and not a fun place for cyclists to share space in.”⁵

I’m with him on that. So, to reiterate: I have no issue with anyone wearing or not wearing a cycle helmet, or indeed high-visibility clothing. I do, however, have very serious worries about efforts to make use of high-vis clothes or helmets compulsory, or even to overly encourage them as a supposed safety panacea. They’re not. As Chris Boardman also noted, in the Netherlands, perhaps the least perilous country for cyclists in the world, helmets and high-vis are almost unknown.

Asking the Wrong Sort of Doctor

Dr. John Black is a very eminent doctor of emergency medicine. Formerly a consultant at one of the UK’s foremost hospitals, the John Radcliffe in Oxford, he has managed helicopter acute medical teams and advised the government on emergency care. He has seen, firsthand, the terrible life consequences that can follow from a head injury on a bike, which evidence shows can often be worsened if the rider is not wearing a helmet. He’s therefore precisely the wrong person you should ask about whether helmet use should be compulsory.

Why? It’s because Black necessarily sees only one rare and extreme side of what is a complex and nuanced issue.

Black believes helmets should be obligatory by law. He was among a series of doctors who wrote to the British Medical Council, which represents the profession, requesting that it formally call for mandatory helmet use. It subsequently did, a decision that remains controversial and much debated.

Black told me he sees his views as “simple common sense,” believing legislation is the best way to increase helmet use. “If someone’s unprotected head strikes a solid surface such as the roadside or the pavement, even if it’s a ground-level fall, patients can sustain devastating head and brain injuries,” he explains. “We know that the wearing of cycling helmets can reduce the risk of that by up to two-thirds.”

Black says he has treated young people who suffered such injuries that left them unable to live independently. “I just don’t think we can afford to plan for particularly young people of working age potentially being incapacitated and needing lifelong care, with all the devastating consequences that has, not just for them but for their families,” he says. “I don’t think we can afford to be complacent about this issue.”

All this makes perfect sense, does it not? Let’s hear, however, from another doctor. Dr. Harry Rutter is a public health expert who specializes in physical activity. He cowrote a chapter on cycle safety for the influential handbook City Cycling. “Helmets do not create safety,” he said. “Only a safe environment, free from the dangers created by motorized traffic and poorly designed roads, can do that.” He is skeptical about an excessive focus on helmets as a safety measure. “Most of the risk of severe injury while cycling is not intrinsic to the activity—motorists impose it on cyclists,” he argued. “Cycling is a benign activity that often takes place in dangerous environments. Of the three main elements determining serious cycling injuries—the road design and conditions, the motorist, and the cyclist—the cyclist is the most studied.”⁶

If I want an expert on one patient’s head trauma, then Black is the doctor I’d choose. But Rutter is an epidemiologist, and so looks at issues on a population-wide level. And the problem with the helmet debate is that too few people do this.

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But let’s begin with something hopefully straightforward and more individual: if you happened to fall off your bike and strike your head, I’m pretty certain a well-fitted and properly fastened helmet would offer some injury protection. Not everyone agrees. If you read an online debate about bike helmets—and I really don’t recommend it—even this can be a surprisingly contentious position to take, with endless talk about whether risks from extra rotational neck injuries caused by a helmet might negate the lessening of head trauma. But the evidence is pretty strongly in favor of a net reduction in injury.

It’s worth stressing that even this has limitations. For example, the EU bike helmet standard promises protection in a drop test up to speeds of 5.52 meters per second, or just over 12 mph.⁷ That will probably help in many of the sort of low-height secondary impacts described by John Black, but nothing much more serious.

Nonetheless, most studies indicate a benefit. A major 2001 review of the research concluded that helmets reduce the risk of head injury by 60 percent.⁸ A 2011 examination of this piece by Rune Elvik, the Norwegian academic and road safety expert we met in chapter 2, said the overall protection could be slightly reduced given what seems to be an increase in the likelihood of a neck injury if you wear a helmet. But it is still very much there.⁹

Now, however, things begin to get more complicated. Whatever the benefits in each individual case, Elvik notes, a population-wide increase in helmet use, for example after legislation, is not generally matched by similar reductions in overall head injury rates. How can this be? Surely a nation of cyclists entirely kitted out with helmets will be notably less prone to injury than those riding bare-headed? Well, yes and no. Again, with helmets things are never as straightforward as they appear.

Close Passes and Unconscious Assumptions

Robert Chirinko is a man with a minor obsession for spotting how people’s behavior changes according to their perception of risk. Thus, he notes, while a small car actually might be less safe if someone is actually in a crash, recognition of this fact makes a person more likely to drive carefully, and they may well end up safer overall. The advent of mobile phones has left Chirinko wondering if some people now take more risks walking alone at night, as being on the phone can give an illusion of connectedness and thus protection.

He also has thoughts on the plague of serious concussions affecting American football. “Is the solution more padded helmets and other protections? Offsetting behavior suggests that more protections lead to a greater feeling of safety, and hence an increase in the severity of tackles, blocks, and other confrontations,” he says. “It follows that the solution may well be less protection. If US footballers feel less safe, they will surely temper their performance on the field accordingly, with desirable health outcomes for all participants.”¹⁰

Chirinko is an economist at the University of Illinois, not a doctor or road safety expert. But his ideas about offsetting behavior, his profession’s term for what psychologists call “risk compensation,” is a fascinating element to the discussion over bike helmets. Most crucially, it can work two ways: it seems the perception of reduced risk from helmet use can both prompt riders to be more reckless with their own safety and nudge drivers into being less careful toward cyclists.

The idea of risk compensation canceling out safety improvements is not new. In Death on the Streets, a 1992 British traffic safety polemic, author and transport expert Robert Davis notes that the invention of the methane-detecting Davy safety lamp for miners in 1815 actually saw more deaths initially, as it prompted mine owners to send workers to shafts seen previously as unworkable for safety reasons.¹¹

Davis also argues that a 1983 law to oblige British drivers and front-seat passengers to wear seat belts might have improved their safety, but at first did little for that of others. A government-commissioned report two years after the law came into effect, by two professors of statistics, found that crashes involving cars had seen a 40 percent rise in cyclist deaths and 14 percent more pedestrian fatalities.¹² Truck drivers remained exempt from the seat-belt law; the number of vulnerable road users they were killing had not risen.

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One of the most famous experiments connected to risk perception and cycle helmets was carried out by Dr. Ian Walker, a psychologist at the University of Bath, and a man who has researched attitudes and reactions to cyclists with more thoroughness than most. In 2006, he attached a computer and an electronic distance gauge to his bike and recorded data from 2,500 drivers who overtook him on the roads. Half the time he wore a bike helmet and half the time he was bare-headed. The results showed motorists tended to pass him more closely when he had the helmet on, coming an average of 8.5 centimeters nearer.¹³

Walker said at the time he believed this was likely to be connected to cycling being relatively rare in the UK, and drivers thus forming preconceived ideas about cyclists based on what they wore. “This may lead drivers to believe cyclists with helmets are more serious, experienced, and predictable than those without,” he wrote.¹⁴

Such half-conscious assumptions can involve more than just helmets, Walker found. In a parallel experiment he also spent some time riding about wearing a long brunette wig, to see whether drivers gave female cyclists more room than men—perhaps because they also assume women are less experienced. They did, it emerged, even when the “woman” was six feet tall and, for the drivers who happened to look in their rearview mirror, surprisingly hairy.

The converse to all this is yet another study carried out by Walker, this time in 2016, which appeared to show a parallel effect to this: that helmet use could potentially make cyclists act in a more reckless fashion.¹⁵ His experiment saw participants of various ages and both genders asked to play a computer game in which they pressed a button to inflate a balloon on the screen. Each inflation earned them more hypothetical money, but also increased the random chance of the balloon bursting, which would wipe out the winnings. At any point players could stop and “bank” what they’d earned from each individual balloon.

Those taking part were fitted with eye-tracking sensors and told this was the purpose of the experiment. However, the sensors were not plugged in—the real test was that half the participants had the eye tracker fitted to a baseball cap, the other half to a bike helmet. Over dozens of games, those wearing the helmets consistently took greater risks on average when inflating the screen balloons.

Walker said this was the first time apparent risk compensation had been identified even when there was no direct link between the improved safety and what the person was actually doing. “The helmet could make zero difference to the outcome, but people wearing one seemed to take more risks in what was essentially a gambling task,” he wrote. “The practical implication of our findings might be to suggest more extreme unintended consequences of safety equipment in hazardous situations than has previously been thought.”¹⁶

All these variables come into play when considering helmet use. Yes, a helmet might make you safer if you get knocked off. However, it might also, even marginally, increase the chance that this happens in the first place. And it’s when a government decides it needs to pass a law making helmet-wearing compulsory that we start to see even more unintended consequences.

“Australians Love Rules and Regulations”

City-wide bike-share programs have become increasingly common in recent years, spreading to hundreds of places around the world. These have almost invariably proved hugely popular. Not, however, in Australia. Melbourne and Brisbane both launched systems in 2010. Both are widely viewed as flops. While bikes in the equivalent London and New York systems get ridden anything from about three to six times a day each, their unloved peers in Melbourne, generally seen as Australia’s most bike-friendly city, are lucky to be used once. A study found the system in Brisbane was the least popular in the world, with each bike ridden just two in every five days on average.¹⁷ In part this is down to flaws in the networks—both are relatively small and spread out. But there’s another factor at play: helmets.

If you ride a share bike in London or New York or Paris or Hangzhou, you can bring a helmet if you want, or otherwise just leap on and pedal away. Do the latter in Melbourne or Brisbane and you risk being stopped and fined by police, because of compulsory helmet-use laws in force since the early 1990s. Both programs have tried to get around this by leaving complimentary helmets on the bikes—Melbourne leaves one thousand new ones a month—or selling cheap helmets at nearby shops. But for many people it’s simply too much bother.

This is one of the many accidental effects of helmet compulsion. Even in a youthful, vibrant, and otherwise innovative city like Melbourne, a bike-share program is a nonstarter. A small if significant opportunity for creating a human-friendly city is lost.

Clover Moore, the lord mayor of Sydney for more than a decade, says she would also love to create a bike-share system there but feels unable to, given the long-standing helmet compulsion law. This comes from the government of the surrounding state, New South Wales, over which she has no control. “I’d like to do it, but with the helmet law it’s not viable,” Moore says. “Australia has a reputation for being a free and easy nation. And the very opposite is true. Australians love rules and regulations, or at least our governments do.”¹⁸

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At some point during such a discussion, a proponent of helmet compulsion will usually say something along the lines of: “Forget all this talk about freedom or inconvenience. If a bike helmet law saves just one life, then it will be worth it, surely?” This is emotive stuff. But the accidental effects of bike helmet laws can go much further than just undermining bike-share systems. Strange as it may initially sound, there is evidence that they can end up causing more deaths than they save.

This is down to the apparent deterrent effect helmet laws have on cycling. Some studies have indicated that they put off enough people from riding bikes in the first place that the resulting negative effect on public health more than cancels out any benefits from fewer head injuries. As with everything connected to this subject, it’s worth noting that it’s all bitterly disputed by opposing sides. But the evidence seems solid.

One study carried out for New South Wales transport authorities in 1993, a year after mandatory helmet use for adults in the state was extended to children, was mainly intended to check whether the new law was increasing helmet uptake. This it had—but the researchers also found a 30 percent reduction in the number of children riding to school.¹⁹ Similar data showed even bigger reductions in bike use in other parts of Australia when helmet laws came in. In New Zealand, where helmet compulsion was introduced in 1994, the number of overall bike trips fell 51 percent between 1989–90 and 2003–6, according to one research paper.²⁰

The reasons are mixed. It can be in part because some people simply don’t want to bother with a helmet, a factor arguably less important now than twenty-plus years ago, when bike helmets were more expensive and not nearly as comfortable. More pressing, however, appears to be the fact that obligatory helmet use reinforces the notion that cycling isn’t an everyday way to get about, but a specialist pursuit needing safety equipment, which makes it less appealing.

Professor Chris Rissel, a public health expert at the University of Sydney, carried out a 2011 study that asked people in the Australian city about the effect of the helmet-use law. It found almost a quarter that said they would cycle more if they did not have to always think about a helmet, with the greatest increase in bike use among younger or occasional cyclists. A repeal of the law would, Rissel said, have a significant positive impact on improved public health.²¹

Another Australian academic once tried to quantify this effect. Piet de Jong, a professor of actuarial science at Macquarie University, crunched figures for the estimated reduction in bike use if helmets are made compulsory against any fall in head injuries. “For most countries, under assumptions favorable to the helmet legislation case, the unintended health costs cancel out the direct health benefit,” he found. For the US, de Jong calculated that an overall net cost to public health of a helmet law would be $4.8 billion a year.²²

Critics have questioned some of de Jong’s calculations. However, there are other potential health drawbacks to helmet compulsion. For a start, if a law does mean fewer cyclists, you have the possibility of a reverse “safety in numbers” effect, the phenomenon we saw in chapter 5—fewer riders on the road could place those remaining at more individual risk.

All this illustrates the problems of asking someone like John Black for their opinion on helmets. His specialization means he comes across the minority of people who have, in his words, “had a bad day.” It’s his colleagues in general medicine, however, who deal with many hundreds of times more patients whose lives have been similarly blighted by diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, strokes—all conditions strongly associated with a lack of exercise. It can be a difficult connection to make, but it’s an important one.

Evidence, Not Anecdote

Callous as it might sound, along with a doctor of emergency medicine, the very last person you want to ask about cycle helmets is a relative of someone who has suffered a head injury while on a bike. In 2010, the British Olympic rower James Cracknell was taking part in a charity cycling event in America when his head was struck by the wing mirror of a passing truck. He suffered a severe head injury but survived, in part because he was wearing a helmet. His wife, Beverley Turner, a TV presenter, has since become a vocal advocate for their compulsory use.

Turner’s approach is highly emotive. “I don’t really care about the macho twits who duck in and out of city traffic wearing headphones but no helmet, without a thought for the mothers and girlfriends who will pick up their pieces,” she wrote in a newspaper column a few years later.²³

I understand Turner feels strongly. That said, she understandably sees just one side of the issue. Turner could have written something else, just as inflammatory but at least more relevant for the bulk of people in modern Britain: “I don’t really care about the lazy twits who duck in and out of fast-food restaurants eating burgers but taking no exercise, without a thought for the wives and children who will pick up their pieces of their diabetes or stroke or heart attack.”

This can be a difficult argument to make. However, proponents of mandatory helmets seek to present themselves as being led by evidence, so it seems right to approach them on those terms. The only part of the UK to have introduced such a law is Jersey, one of the mainly self-governing Channel Islands in the waters between England and France. In 2014, the States of Jersey, the island’s centuries-old combined legislature and executive, passed a law compelling children thirteen or under to wear a helmet, at pains of a £50 fine for their parents.

In many ways, wearing a helmet makes even more sense for children than it does adults. They have a greater likelihood to fall off bikes and, when they do, are more likely to hurt their heads, in part as young bodies are disproportionately weighted toward the skull. My son wears a helmet whenever he’s cycling. That said, there is currently no evidence that Jersey’s law will achieve anything at all.

The island’s government commissioned the UK’s respected and independent Transport Research Laboratory to evaluate the plan. Its report found that the year before the ban was imposed, 84 percent of Jersey children wore helmets anyway, and not a single under-fourteen had been seriously hurt on a bike.²⁴ So even if the law suddenly meant every child wore a helmet, which is unlikely, that’s still a sixteen-percentage-point protection improvement for zero casualties.

At the time, I spoke to Andrew Green, the Jersey politician behind the law. He dismissed the idea that it would see a reduction in cycling, but offered only an anecdotal argument as to why: “I believe children participating in cycling will increase after the law, based on the number of phone calls I’ve had from parents saying, ‘I want little Johnny to wear a helmet. He won’t wear it because his friends won’t wear one. Therefore I won’t let him have a bike.’”²⁵ It’s an argument. But it’s not evidence.

The tragic backstory to Green’s interest is that his now-adult son is unable to live independently after he suffered a serious head injury on a bike when he was nine. Green himself chairs Headway, a charity that does fantastic work with people who have suffered brain injuries but has branched out, controversially, as a vocal advocate of helmet compulsion.

As with Beverley Turner, it’s easy to see why Green does what he does. It can be difficult to counter his views, but equally it’s important that someone does. Of its annual budget of £630 million in the year the law was passed, Jersey’s government spent precisely £150,000 on “pedestrian and safety improvements.”

This is a compact island with a benign climate and lots of green space. Yet 23 percent of its five-year-olds are overweight or obese, rising to 35 percent of children ages ten or eleven, higher figures than in the rest of the UK. When it comes to improving the health of children, the government might be better served doing everything it can to get them on bikes, not passing laws that overexaggerate the dangers of doing so.

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While Jersey has been passing a law based, seemingly, on anecdote and personal experience, one of the most prestigious peer-reviewed scientific health publications in the world has twice published papers examining the impact of helmet compulsion. Both times it has found the case, at very best, unproven.

In 2006, the British Medical Journal carried an examination of the evidence by Dorothy Robinson, an Australian statistician, into what actually happened in New Zealand and Australia after helmet compulsion laws were passed. This research backed the contention that they can reduce the number of cyclists, especially children. One automated bike counter in Perth, Western Australia, saw falls of 20 percent, 24 percent, and 35 percent, respectively, in the amount of riders in the three years after the legislation. “All available [long- and short-term] data show cycling is less popular than would have been expected without helmet laws,” Robinson concluded.²⁶

The study also uncovered complications over figures that do seemingly show a reduction in head injuries suffered by cyclists following helmet compulsion laws, a fact much touted by advocates. For example, it found evidence that adult cyclists who opt to wear helmets tend to be more safety-conscious anyway, while helmeted children are more likely to ride in parks rather than streets. So, even as helmeted cyclists suffered fewer head injuries, they also had fewer serious nonhead injuries. As is so often the case with dubious science, correlation did not necessarily equal causation.

Finally, the study noted, helmet use laws had often come into force at the same time as other road safety measures, such as random driver alcohol breath testing in parts of Australia, which was likely to have even more impact on safety. The conclusion? The idea that bike helmet laws directly improve overall safety for cyclists doesn’t appear to be backed by any evidence from countries where these laws have actually been passed.

Another BMJ paper looked into helmet compulsion laws in Canada, passed by various provinces from the midnineties onwards. The 2013 research found provinces that had made helmets mandatory did see a quicker reduction in cyclist head injuries than those that did not. However, the same thing had been taking place before helmet compulsion. Again, the connection could not be safely made. The researchers concluded: “We were unable to detect an independent effect of legislation.”²⁷

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Why is the public and government narrative about helmet use in some countries so at odds with the evidence? For this we turn to yet another BMJ article, in this case an opinion piece written by two experts with a knack of making complex concepts easy to follow—Dr. Ben Goldacre, a doctor who has a parallel media career debunking poorly written science articles, and David Spiegelhalter, professor of the public understanding of risk at Cambridge University.

Even such a pair confessed they had reservations about tackling the subject. “We have both spent a large part of our working lives discussing statistics and risk with the general public,” they wrote. “We both dread questions about bicycle helmets.”

The article looked into whether helmets do protect individual users and then whether promoting or mandating them brings a wider public health benefit. It was a vexed issue, they said, and almost impossible to determine anything meaningful amid a complex scientific methodology, over which were laid various layers of politics, culture, and belief.

“Supporters of helmets often tell vivid stories about someone they knew, or heard of, who was apparently saved from severe head injury by a helmet,” the article said. “For others, this is an explicitly political matter, where an emphasis on helmets reflects a seductively individualistic approach to risk management.”

Their very slightly depressing conclusion? The noisy arguments will continue indefinitely, with virtually no one having their view swayed either way. “The current uncertainty about any benefit from helmet wearing or promotion is unlikely to be substantially reduced by further research,” they predict. The popularity of bike helmets as a road safety measure was based less on any direct benefits, they said, but more so on people’s often very skewed personal perceptions of risk.²⁸

Seeing, but Choosing Not to See

While much of the cycle safety debate centers around helmets, high-visibility clothing has an equally pernicious role to play, as with the pupils of Signhills Academy. Again, the unquestioned assumption of 90 percent of the people you talk to about the subject is that wearing a tabard or waistcoat in a lurid Day-Glo color is a boring but utterly necessary part of being an urban cyclist.

The converse is that not wearing one somehow makes you partly to blame for a crash, whatever the actual cause. A friend of mine was once knocked off her bike by a car that steered toward the curb, pushing her onto a sidewalk. Visibility was perfect, she could clearly be seen, and the distracted driver completely culpable. And yet when her mother heard about the incident, she sent her daughter a high-visibility waistcoat in the mail. The mother meant well, but the implied message is poisonous.

Again, I have no issue with people using or not using high-visibility gear. But it’s important to stress how irrelevant it is in the wider safety argument.

In 2013, Britain’s Transport Research Laboratory looked at twelve studies on the issue going back to 1969. This centered on motorbikes, in part because there is much more research on how they can remain visible to drivers. The report found one study that seemed to show that drivers saw moving motorbikes more quickly if there was a greater color contrast between the background and the rider’s clothes. Another concluded that, depending on the road and traffic, the most visible rider apparel could be a high-vis jacket, a white jacket, or even a black jacket.

“The results are interesting in that they show the previously held assertion that a bright reflective jacket will improve rider conspicuity may not always be true,” the TRL investigators wrote, saying people “need to be aware of the limitations” of efforts to be seen.²⁹

In other words, high-vis might well help you to be seen. But it’s not the solution to everything.

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The most fascinating and, in many ways, alarming study about what cyclists can realistically do to protect themselves amid poor road infrastructure also centers on highly visible clothing. Inevitably, it was conducted by the tireless and ever-imaginative Dr. Ian Walker (who is, I should stress given how often I’ve mentioned him, no relation).

In 2013, Walker carried out a more extensive version of his helmet study. It also measured how closely drivers passed a bike when overtaking, but this time he tried out seven different outfits. Four made him look like a cyclist of varying experience and dedication, ranging from full Lycra to more everyday clothes, as well as one involving a high-visibility jacket. Three other outfits were based around bright yellow waistcoats bearing written messages. One read NOVICE CYCLIST: PLEASE PASS SLOWLY; another said, POLITE: PLEASE SLOW DOWN—“polite” is sometimes used by UK cyclists and horseback riders in the hope drivers might mistake it for “police”—and finally one read, POLICE: CAMERA CYCLIST.

Walker gathered data for just under 5,700 overtakes and discovered something very interesting: none of the outfits made an appreciable difference to driver behavior, apart from the one saying “police.” For the six others, the average passing distance was between about forty-five and forty-six inches. For “police” it went above forty-eight inches. Similarly, the proportion of drivers who went very near the bike was noticeably lower for the “police” vest. In contrast, the tabard saying “polite” saw the nearest average overtaking distance and almost twice as many potentially dangerous passes as “police.”³⁰

The lesson seems clear and worrying. Drivers were perfectly able to distinguish between different types of rider, and to read and absorb any message displayed. But rather than adjusting their driving to the perceived experience of the cyclist, it was only when faced with a threat to their own welfare—the sight of what seemed to be a police rider—that many allowed a cyclist more space on the road. Most alarming still, some seemed to treat the mild attempt at deception of “polite” as a reason to almost punish the cyclist.

Walker is too professional to put it in such strong terms. But he admits to worries. When he carried out the 2006 helmet experiment, he says, he did not conclude that the results meant drivers didn’t care. “I felt that was a very callous interpretation, and it was more likely that they just took the helmet as an indication of experience,” he says now.

The later study changed his view, Walker explains: “It really might have been something like, ‘Well, he’s got a helmet, it doesn’t matter.’”³¹

This is yet another layer of context for the debate about helmets and high-visibility clothes. Dress up like a Day-Glo beacon, some still argue, and even if this does end up putting other people off cycling, or even bringing a net disbenefit to society, at least drivers can see you.

However, Walker’s last study raises a frightening proposition, one that plenty of regular cyclists in places like the UK, the United States, and Australia would probably recognize. Far too many drivers can see you perfectly well, it seems. When they skim past you at high speed, it could just be that they don’t especially care for your welfare. I certainly recognize that picture from my own experiences.

How can that be possible? What sort of rotten, skewed road culture would see drivers put a fellow human being at minor if appreciable risk, seemingly just for the sake of it? There are lots of possible answers, which we look at in the next chapter.