Yes, apologies.
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I appreciate hearing from someone who has used one. I kinda thought they were just randomly sprinkled around areas for show.
It’s not that we doubt bicycle helmets are a good thing. It’s that, there’s not very much evidence they’re a better thing than helmets for hundreds of far riskier activities that you’d be looked at like a lunatic for doing helmeted.
Like, walking helmets might be a better thing than bicycling helmets (the few studies that have compared walking helmetless to cycling helmetless have found very similar rates of head injury and death by head trauma, some finding walking to be more dangerous, some cycling. There is no way that it makes sense to cycle with a helmet on to a soccer game, take the helmet off to play soccer, and put it back on to ride home. etc.)
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Is there anyone who’s had a head-smacking injury when they were on foot who wishes they hadn’t been wearing a helmet?
Do you wear a helmet to walk, or tut-tut at people who don’t?
Have you looked up comparative risk assessment studies to check your intuition that cycling has the inherently higher head injury risk, and hence should be the first one to have its risk mitigated?
Yes, because people are stupid and won’t do the right thing most of the time.
Admit when the dynamics are inherently and unavoidably problematic or GTFO.
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I would say it more precisely that the user has to be responsible for their own safety gear, because there is no simple solution providing for secure, sanitary helmet rental at the point of rental for a dock less bike system.
A helmet vending machine is not located at the point of rental. I bet there are many stores which sell helmets in the use area of every Byrd and Lyme area; and yet the problem persists.
Byrd and Lyme both advise their users that they should wear a helmet and make them freely available to their users. And yet, the problem persists.
Onzo provides helmets with their bikes, as someone said. And yet, in their own promotional splash image, 4 out of 9 bicyclists were not wearing helmets. So the problem persists.
If Lyme or Byrd rented me a scooter that was defective and it broke and caused me an injury, that’s on them. If I use it without knowing what I am doing and I bust my butt, it’s my fault. If I’m not wearing a helmet, that’s MY fault.
I don’t think that there is anyone out there who is so stupid that they don’t know that wearing a helmet while biking or scooting is a good idea, and that not wearing one is a bad idea. And yet…
As I said earlier, I don’t support laws punishing riders who don’t wear helmets. That is not the same thing as believing everyone should still wear them, which I adamantly do. What that article conflates are two issues: the utility of safety gear and the utility of legal requirements for safety gear. The implication that safety gear makes cyclists less safe by somehow letting drivers off the hook is a false dichotomy. We can and should promote safer road conditions for cyclists/motorcyclists and riders should wear safety gear. Wearing safety gear is not giving drivers permission to endanger riders, and there’s an odor of victim blaming in suggesting it does.
I’ve encountered a number of riders who go a step further than conflating the two issues, as the article does, to outright advocating for riding without a helmet on the theory that it will encourage drivers to drive more carefully around riders. That’s not going to happen. Enforcing laws requiring drivers to share the road safely or face legal penalties will encourage drivers to drive more carefully around riders.
And no matter how careful drivers are around riders, it’s still foolish to ride without a helmet. I support riders’ right to be fools, but when they start promoting others to do the same, I dispute them because I’m not in the habit of remaining silent in the face of reckless advice to riders.
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What are the various causes of pedestrian injuries?
Are we talking the elderly/balance-compromised as a subset of pedestrians? Then yes, I’m for a helmet there. Legislate it? Hmmm. Bring on the debate.
People tripping on uneven sidewalks? probably a good number, too. Legislate something? Let’s hear it.
Inattention from cellphonitis? Bring on the debate.
Inattention in general?
Others? I’d be surprised if there were a majority here. But let’s get that debate going if necessary.
But sure, let’s prohibit all unhelmeted pedestrianism (or in a pan-whataboutism solution: permanant helmets from birth) until we solve the scooter head injury problem … just in case.
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We don’t need a debate, we need science. We’ve had all the “debate” and selective context-free science quoting that we can have on bicycle helmets, and dear merciful Cthulhu the one thing it hasn’t brought us is anything like a reasonable policy position.
That’s exactly the opposite of my point, sorry if it looked that way.
My point was meant to be that
- We accept the head injury rates associated with unhelmeted pedestrianism, because we’ve probably reasonably concluded that they are already acceptable and not in need of mitigation.
- We do not accept the head injury rates associated with unhelmeted motorcycle riding, because we’ve probably reasonably concluded that they are not acceptable and mitigation is not only desirable but important enough to bring legal repercussions into the mix.
- Other activities like bicycling and scooter riding get a great deal of prominently denominator and comparison-free argle-bargle about helmets, even though the one thing that would be helpful in coming to a useful decision on whether helmets should be ignored, recommended, or mandatory, would be a comparison on the basis of a common denominator to other activities that fall in each category.
Problem is, if we did that we’d probably find something like Dr David Nutt’s comparison of the risks and legal statuses of recreational drugs, which found that a drug’s legal classification had no identifiable statistical correlation with its harmfulness.
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It’s weird to talk about the scooters absent a discussion of how we handle car culture. I imagine a close look at the numbers of the injuries of scooter users is heavily influenced by interaction with car infrastructure, well beyond the number actually struck by a car. Some share of the people who are classified as falls fell because they were relegated to a surface with worse surface conditions than we provide for cars. When you call the scooters a menace you have to compare them to the alternatives and one of the major alternatives is cars.
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Even better, when you rent a scooter (or motorcycle or bike) there should be check box asking if you’re going to wear a helmet. If you decline, it should automatically sign you us as an organ donor!
My point was that the dynamics of scooter rentals inherently discourage helmet wearing. The companies saying, “You should wear a helmet,” while knowing that, is worthless. The scooter rental model relies on externalizing a lot of basic costs and issues, which is what they’re doing in this case.
There aren’t “many stores” that sell helmets in my local scooter use area (and I suspect that’s usually true), but expecting people to buy a helmet for every brief-use scooter rental isn’t reasonable anyways. (If helmets became mandatory, then the scooter rental business model collapses, thus solving the problem in a round-about way.)
But I have to say, insisting that one can’t point out the problems in a system unless one comes up with a solution is bullshit. It’s doubly bullshit because inherent in that is the demand that the business model be kept intact in the proposed solution - especially when the business model is the problematic bit.
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Judging from that video that someone posted, I’d say a cup would be advisable. A helmet with a face shield looks to be a good choice, too.
Shmg, I will clothesline anyone who tries to scooter past me while on a sidewalk 
You’ll never catch me wearing a backpack on two shoulders unless I’m on a hike. Oh, and as other posters have noted that is unrelated to the logistics of finding a helmet when needed.
Most of the scooter fad has happened before I was aware of it. But a few weeks ago, we were heading East for the winter, and spent a few hours in Nashville(I think) . There were tons of them there. The traffic was pretty heavy, but they were just zipping between cars and on and off the sidewalks.
I might be wrong, but it really looked to me like the people riding them might be unaware of any risk or danger. People who bike or skate in urban environments pretty quickly develop survival skills, especially awareness of traffic and obstacles and such. The people I saw from my admittedly short exposure, did not seem to be paying much attention.
That combined with the fact that a large percentage of drivers are distracted by their phones, made it look like a pretty scary activity to me.
And I do not scare easily. I enjoy cave diving, for instance.
Hear hear! I live in the University Heights area of San Diego, and I can attest to scooter users either crowding the sidewalks or running around traffic like its an empty parking lot.
I wonder though, how much this relates to the presence of bike lanes and properly designed roads. SD is notoriously unaccommodating to bicyclists. Los Angeles as well. I wonder what the injury stats would be in a bike friendly city like Copenhagen…
I am one of those people who almost always has some sort of pack. Most of the time, I sling it over one shoulder, but it seems absurd to buy one made with only one strap. Because sometimes I need to actually get up to some ledge or get across a stream, and I am not going to move everything to a different pack for such occasions, or can even predict when those circumstances will arise.
I bet the casual scooter rider probably does not own a decent helmet. Provided helmets might be a sanitary issue, and disposable ones would create a whole different set of problems.
Disposable sanitary liners, perhaps?
You guys worry about other people too much. Just let them enjoy the wind in their hair and the 0.1% chance that they suffer a head injury. It is a hassle lugging a helmet with you everywhere you go. They can’t do helmet rentals because of hygiene/ lice, etc.
