@algo
Everyone accidentally types their autobiography's title into CCE at some point. 'Poked in the Eye by Rogue Celery' is yours. 'Overtaken by Midges' is @unhurt's.
CityCyclingEdinburgh Forum » Debate!
THE Helmet Thread
(895 posts)-
Posted 7 years ago #
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@IWRATS
Could be interesting in the wind...
Posted 7 years ago # -
Suitably perforated?
Posted 7 years ago # -
In order to use this autobiography title I'll have to actually do something worth writing down. Midlife crisis planning: activated...
Posted 7 years ago # -
@Iwrats: oh, hang on:
Everyone accidentally types their autobiography's title into CCE at some point
=
"Suitably perforated"
Posted 7 years ago # -
I'll get typing.
It was a dark and stormy night...
Posted 7 years ago # -
Posted 7 years ago #
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@wangi - most interesting bit there is under the previous action taken to resolve the issue: "I have been in contact with Miles Briggs MSP and Jamie Greene MSP to try to resolve this issue. They have both agreed there is no legislation for this currently and would like to support me with this petition."
Miles Briggs in anti-cyclist shocker.
Posted 7 years ago # -
As an anaesthetist, I have seen people with devastating head injuries as a result of cycling accidents.
I wonder as an anaesthetist has she seen people with devastating head injuries as a result of motor vehicle accidents and whether she has a similar petition covering that?
One of the Glasgow cycling twiteratti regularly reminds us that emergency doctors aren't epidemiologists.
Miles Briggs in anti-cyclist shocker
His appalling PoP speech was the first time I saw him. He has done nothing since then to redeem himself.
Posted 7 years ago # -
Maybe there's some coordination going on -
Posted 7 years ago # -
One of the Glasgow cycling twiteratti regularly reminds us that emergency doctors aren't epidemiologists.
For balance (of sorts), I read this interview with a brain surgeon in the New Statesman a while ago.
"Henry never wears a helmet when he cycles. He has seen too many brain-injured cyclists, even those who’ve been wearing helmets, to wish to survive, should he ever get knocked off his bike."
Posted 7 years ago # -
Does anyone want to pass legislation which will see hundreds turning out en masse to disobey it?
I do wear a helmet - partly because the visor keeps rain off my glasses/sun out of my eyes - but nothing would make me more of a scofflaw than legislation telling me I have to wear one.
Posted 7 years ago # -
Was expecting that to be the Road Traffic Act, but your works too.
Posted 7 years ago # -
I just wear mine as like that extraterrestrial alien look it gives.
Posted 7 years ago # -
There's a bloody debate on Newsnight just now about this nonsense "safety" proposal for compulsory helmets and hi-vis.
Green party MLA lady is giving a great account of herself.
Posted 7 years ago # -
Does anyone want to pass legislation which will see hundreds turning out en masse to disobey it?
Posted 7 years ago # -
Update from BikeBiz
The Times paid £10,000 to fund the parliamentary Get Britain Cycling report, and an editorial endorsed the call for “changes to speed limits, better training for children and drivers, improved road junctions and more segregated cycle routes.”
(While the newspaper’s cyclesafe articles used to be free to access – they have now been placed behind the Murdoch paywall.)
Back in 2012 I said I welcomed the kick-off of the cyclesafe campaign, but I warned that it was possible that “the messages left after the campaign has finished will be negative ones: the result might not be improved junctions and Dutch-style separated cycle paths but mandatory use of substandard bike paths, a licensing fee for cyclists, helmet compulsion and other 'safety measures’ that are easy and cheap for politicians to implement but actually do little to improve cycle safety.”
http://www.bikebiz.com/news/read/the-times-now-whimpers-on-cycling-when-before-it-thundered/022274
Posted 7 years ago # -
Couple of pints with colleagues last night and discovered that the new lad, a fit, outgoing mid-20ish guy who moved to Edinburgh a couple of months ago won't even contemplate cycling to work. He regularly walks to work - from just near me, in fact - and his observations of traffic volume/behavior plus road layout on his route have led him to conclude it's just not safe.
Forcing everyone to wear a helmet will fix that, right?
Posted 7 years ago # -
"It's a war zone. But flak jackets will cut serious casualties by 50%."
Posted 7 years ago # -
The old joke:- a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged.
The new joke:- a greenie is a conservative who rides a bicycle in a city.
Peter Hitchens in the Mail on Sunday
"it seems I am to be punished for my rejection of the sacred car, by being ordered to wear body-armour while I bicycle.
A silly Minister, Jesse Norman, has launched a ‘review’ that will ‘consider’ the mandatory wearing of cycle helmets.
I’ve tried these things. Have you ever looked at one? A bowl of Styrofoam with a thin plastic coating, wildly expensive to buy, easy to leave behind on a train, which might conceivably save you from injury if you fell off at 4mph. Otherwise? Not much.
It’s quite useful in a hailstorm. But it won’t save you if a 45-ton lorry decides to turn across your path, or if a water-filled pothole deeper than it looks (there are more and more of these, and Mr Norman’s Transport Department seems unable to do anything about it) sends you sprawling in front of a bus.
More important, drivers think a rider in a helmet is invulnerable – so they treat him worse than they otherwise would. Research has shown that drivers steer dangerously closer to helmeted cyclists than to those without headgear.
A bike helmet is not a device to make cyclists safer. It is a device for making drivers feel safer while driving selfishly. Far too many motorists want cyclists to be wholly responsible for their own safety, so they don’t need to bother taking care. Many of their minds have been poisoned by Clarksonite rubbish about how we ‘don’t pay road tax’. Oh yes, we do.
In the Netherlands, where everyone understands that bicycling is a sensible, clean, quiet, healthy way to travel, you hardly ever see a bike helmet at all. It’s not the cycling that’s dangerous, you see. It’s the other road users who won’t show consideration."
Posted 7 years ago # -
For once I agree with something written in the Mail on Sunday...
Posted 7 years ago # -
Chris Boardman talking sense. In Australia and New Zealand helmet wearing is compulsory and people look at you aghast when you say it's not the case in the UK.
"In the late 1980s, as a response to her child being struck by a car from behind whilst riding to school, Rebecca Oaten started a campaign to make helmets compulsory for all cyclists in New Zealand. In 1994 she got her wish and it became illegal to ride a bicycle anywhere in the country, without protective headgear...
what about Mrs Oaten and her campaign? Imagine if her understandable anger over her son’s terrible accident had been directed not at protecting people in the event of a crash, but at the cause of the incident, the person, who rammed her son from behind as he rode to school? What if her campaign had been to have speeds reduced or areas around schools made car-free? Measures to make streets safe for children to do normal things in normal clothes? Imagine how many lives she would have saved then.
https://www.britishcycling.org.uk/article/20171126-Chris-Boardman-0
Posted 7 years ago # -
Rosie, what are New Zealand injury figures like since the introduction of compulsory helmets?
Boardman sensible as ever and calling the government out for having this debate again as of course the evidence has been discussed with them before. But the evidence doesn't suit the opinion.
Posted 7 years ago # -
@gembo - don't know the stats. NZ is very car-centric though they have been making the cities better for cycling in recent years. So you'd have a fairly low proportion of the population cycling anyway.
Posted 7 years ago # -
Far from being reassured by the "evidence led" comment I would be very alarmed.
Some years ago the government commissioned an extensive (and expensive) enquiry in to a perceived issue regarding vehicle use. This enquiry came up with lots of evidence to show that the perception was wrong and that no restrictive action was required.
That did not suit the unspoken agenda and the activity was severely restricted nonetheless, which created unintended problems.
If cyclists have to wear hi-viz then the unarguable extension is that pedestrians should do likewise, which of course means tnat motorists have to carry similar for when they become pedestrians at the end of their journey.
I'll bet the motoring lobby haven't thought that through.
Posted 7 years ago # -
What was the issue @Blueth?
Posted 7 years ago # -
@blueth, it is only on here that you hear calls for peds to go hi viz. some do of course for walking on unlit canal towpath etc. No one in govt. will ever think peds need bibs, too busy pandering to whomsoever is running the campaign against cycling, maybe the PR firm that had that brief, maybe a whim of a an aristo or a chief exec. Or maybe some UnfortunAte people affected by accidents, who can say?
Posted 7 years ago # -
I have an activist friend in Seattle. She thinks pedestrians should have to wear hi vis or reflective clothing when it's dark. Despite her nuanced understanding of structural issues in many other areas of life she has a massive blind spot about this. I assume is because she drives everywhere. She can't understand why it would be an issue to require of people on foot because it's for their own safety . We no longer talk about this issue because aaaaaaaaaaaaaa!
Posted 7 years ago # -
@unhurt because aaaaaaaaaa?
You turn into Mark E Smith?
Posted 7 years ago #
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