Question:
Riders should wear bicycle helmets every time they ride. In the event of a crash, wearing a bicycle helmet reduces the risk of serious head injury by as much as 85% and the risk for brain injury by as much as 88%.6 Helmets have also been shown to reduce the risk of injury to the upper and mid-face by 65%.7 In fact, if each rider wore a helmet, an estimated 500 bicycle-related fatalities and 151,000 nonfatal head injuries would be prevented each year—that’s one death per day and one injury every four minutes.8 Unfortunately, estimates on helmet usage suggest that only 25% of children ages 5-14 years wear a helmet when riding.9 The percentage is close to zero when looking at teen riders. Children and adolescents’ most common complaints are that helmets are not fashionable, or "cool", their friends don=t wear them, and/or they are uncomfortable (usually too hot). Riders also convey that they do not think about the importance of bike helmets, nor about the need to protect themselves from injury, particularly if they are not riding in traffic. Accordingly, the national health goal for 2010 is for 50% of teenage bicyclists in 9th-12th grade to wear wear helmets.10 What strategies are available to get bicyclists to wear helmets?

How large a problem are bicycle-related head injuries in the United States?

Answer: I have seen a great decline in cycling, especially unsupervised cycling by children in wealthier neighborhoods. The kind of places where parents feel the need to keep up on the latest scare stories to keep their children 'safe'.

Such a town is like the one I live in now. I rarely have seen children riding without mommie and daddie with them, all wearing helmets riding on the sidewalk (typically the wrong way).

Neither do I deny that there is a head injury risk (and a larger one) from descending stairs. I'm merely trying to put it in perspective. The risk of serious head injury from cycling is much, much smaller than people have been led to believe. And within the last year, my brother received a head injury that would have made the bicycling horror stories... if he had been on a bike! Instead, he was driving a company truck going from one of his supervision sites to another. He was hit by another vehicle and head injured, making him yet another one of the largest category of head-injured folks, those that are injured within a motor vehicle.

Clearly, if he were wearing a helmet, it would have been damaged. Clearly, the doctors would have said that his helmet prevented "at least some head injury", and they may have been right. But as it is, the largest source of serious head injury gets almost no mention of helmets. A very, very minor source which is no more dangerous per hour gets demonized by people who don't know the data, and who judge danger by their feelings, not by reason or experience - or facts.