Sales of bicycles and accessories have increased during lockdown, with many new cyclists now on the roads. Some will be wearing head protection, but a leading bicycle helmet maker has stressed that bicycle helmets are not designed to mitigate against impacts from motor vehicles.
“We’ve noticed a big increase in demand,” Eric Richter, senior director of turn logo development, told me from california.
This momentum, he adds, is “rewarding because we see consumers returning on motorcycles that have been stored or underutilized for years, and it’s a very positive long-term opportunity.”
However, cyclists deserve not to rely on bike helmets to provide surprise coverage with cars, trucks or other large, heavy and fast road vehicles.
“There are many misconceptions about helmets,” Richter told British trade magazine Cycling Industry News on July 6.
“We don’t design helmets in particular to lessen the threat or severity of injuries when the effects involve a car,” Richter said.
“The number of variables is too great to calculate.”
These variables come with the speed of the motor vehicle, its mass, the angle of influence and the profile of the vehicle.
In 2016, 50% of the people killed while riding their bicycles in the U.S. were not wearing helmets, which leaves the other half, some of whom may have been wearing helmets but who were still killed after being hit by motorists.
It would possibly seem obvious that soft bike helmets, made of expanded polystyrene, offer little coverage of fast-moving multi-ton motor vehicles, however, many helmetless cyclists report that some motorists are yelling at them not to wear helmets.
And, it can even be said that the use of bicycle helmets presents a new danger: to overtake motorists “up close” who mistakenly assume that bicycle helmets are a shielding bureaucracy that will protect cyclists from any engine effect. Vehicles.
This is the conclusion of a study widely cited by British psychologist Ian Walker, who discovered that cyclists with bare heads had the longest pass-through distances among motorists. His 2007 studio used a bicycle with a camera and a distance measuring device.
Dr. Walker recorded the knowledge of 2,500 drivers who crossed him on the roads near his workplace, the University of Bath. Half the time he was dressed in a bicycle helmet and part of the time he didn’t dress with one. The effects showed that motorists tended to overtake him more strongly when traveling in a helmet.
“Wearing a bicycle helmet led to [motor] traffic getting significantly closer when overtaking,” concluded Dr. Walker. Along with an Australian statistician he replicated the study in 2018 with similar findings.
These “punitive passes” can also result in collisions, collisions that can result in injury and death – not those guilty of harmful overtaking.
Last year, research carried out by car manufacturer Volvo and bicycle helmet maker POC found that “current bike helmet testing procedures are fairly rudimentary.”
The Swedish trade marks stated that these tests referred to “helmets falling from other heights on a flat or sloping surface, and take into account [motor] bicycle accidents”.
Bicycle helmets sold in the United States must pass federally required tests designed through the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) and also through the American Society of Testing and Materials (ASTM). Tests check coverage as opposed to skull fractures, but bicycle helmets are not designed to prevent less serious injuries without delay, such as concussions.
“The fabrics used in the maximum [recreational] helmets are designed to absorb high-impact energies that can cause skull fractures and severe brain damage,” says a CPSC statement.
“However,” caveats the organization, “these materials have not been proven to counteract the energies believed to cause concussions.”
The CPSC notes, “No helmet design has been demonstrated to prevent concussions.”
AsTM helmets member Jim Moss outdoor sports attorney Jim Moss agrees: “No cycling helmet is made to prevent concussions. Period.”
“The current helmet criteria do a smart task when addressing the types of non-unusual effects and energies associated with them,” Richter says.
While bike helmets may offer little coverage against motor vehicle shocks and cannot provide guaranteed coverage against concussions, they can save lives when used in collision scenarios for which they were designed, such as hitting their head against a branch of a tree or falling on the sidewalk a low-speed drop.
Not all head blows are direct hits, many occur from an angle and many fashionable helmets now offer opposite coverage to such rotational forces, which may be the cause of at least some concussions.
The leading manufacturer of anti-rotation generation is MIPS, which means multidirectional surprise coverage system. A helmet provided with an MIPS insert allows some movement between the outer layer of a helmet and the layer opposite the head, absorbing some rotational surprises and potentially cutting off the threat of concussions.
“In recent years, a greater emphasis on rotational force control has had a significant effect on hull design, technology, engineering and testing,” Richter said.
“Understanding the effects of rotational movement on the brain and running towards rotational forces by integrating technologies like MIPS into helmets for more than five to 10 years is the ultimate visual example of how head coverage evolves in reaction to greater knowledge.”
Bell Helmets was founded in 1954 to make helmets for autosports. Evel Knievel stated his Bell helmet helped save his life after his motorcycle crash at Caesars Palace, Las Vegas, in 1967.
Giro’s first product was the 1986 Prolight, a ventilated motorcycle helmet that accounted for part of the weight of other bicycle helmets of the time.
Vista Outdoor is headquartered in the surf in the city of Scotts Valley, near Santa Cruz, and is home to the Dome, an independent logo study center that was established in the 1950s as a laboratory and workshop for Bell Helmets.
“Head covering is a serious matter,” says Dome’s promotional Helmetfacts.com.
Article updated on July 11 with main points on the 2007 and 2018 studies on “close pass” helmets through Dr. Ian Walker.
I was Press Gazette’s Transport Journalist of the Year, 2018. I’m also an historian – my most recent books include “Roads Were Not Built for Cars” and “Bike Boom”, both
Transport Journalist of the Year 2018 through Press Gazette. I’m also a historian – my most recent books come with “Roads Were Not Built for Cars” and “Bike Boom,” published through Island Press, Washington, D.C.