It's tiring to hear people deny reality, which in this case is that the % of helmet users in countries not mandating them is extremely low (France and Netherlands

To the "dedicated non-helmet user" in post no. 11: if you're going to make such preposterous claims, particularly here on SBlog, you might want to produce some data to back them up. Just because you "grew up in a country where there were thousands of non-helmeted cyclists and (you) rarely heard of an accident" doesn't mean there weren't any. What an odd object of dedication.

There are seven ways to detect bad science by just the smell of it. This study violates four of them.
http://webexhibits.org/bogus/index.html

Use your common sense and just imagine how many ways this study could be faulty. In addition to the previously-mentioned ways in which the tester himself could have deliberately or accidently affected the measurements, there are many common-sense holes and flaws. Drivers don't give a damn about cyclists, helmets or not -- are we supposed to beleive that drivers have enough time to make this call. Drivers who might normally harass a male cyclist might be a little more gentlemanly to a female cyclist (as the guy was pretending to be). One or two cars in a single test session driving five feet away from the cyclist could easily skew the average distances (note he uses average and not mean distance, another sign of crap science).

Wear your damn helmets, kids.

He must have ridden an awful lot -- and maybe on really skinny streets, too -- but he said he was brushed several times by cars. Most of those times was when he was wearing his helmet.

If you think about it, this study probably also supports the idea that removing all signs and markings from the road leads motorists to drive slower and be more careful.

So I wonder: are we just more risk-averse? Are more vehicles out to get us here? Are we worse bicyclists?

I think also I can point out that in most other countries, cycling is more common, and is used for transportation, so you don't have messengers and spandex tornoadoes whizzing around too fast for their own good (flame suit on.)

i'll take the helmet.

The FARS system is painful to use but does seem to have a lot of data on cyclist and pedestrian injuries and fatalities, one just has to be very patient to use it.

Put another way, helmets don't prevent all fatalities. The more people wear helmets, the more likely helmet-wearers will be among those fatalities for which a helmet is not protection.

For example, the 2005 report http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/pdf/nrd-30/NCSA/TSF2005/810617.pdf says that 784 pedacyclists were killed but 45000 were injured. Unfortunately the FARS website is so painfully slow I can't pull up the 1994/1995 data (http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/).

There's a summary report here: http://www.iihs.org/research/fatality_facts/bicycles.html

A helmet camouflaged under a wig of blond tresses.

That doesn't make sense to me, and I'm wondering what other factors contribute to that. The total fatal numbers from the first and last years are almost identical, just the ratio has changed.

      No helmet use  Helmet use        Total*
Year    Num      %      Num     %       Num
1994 	776 	97 	19 	2 	796
1995 	783 	95 	34 	4 	828
1996 	731 	96 	27 	4 	761
1997 	785 	97 	23 	3 	811
1998 	741 	98 	16 	2 	757
1999 	698 	93 	42 	6 	750
2000 	622 	90 	50 	7 	689
2001 	616 	84 	60 	8 	729
2002 	589 	89 	54 	8 	663
2003 	535 	85 	58 	9 	626
2004 	602 	83 	87 	12 	722
2005 	673 	86 	76 	10 	782

*Total includes other and/or unknowns

SOURCE: http://www.iihs.org/research/fatality_facts/bicycles.html

If anyone actually reads through the whole study, let us know.