Posted on Friday, February 08, 2002 - 04:27 pm:

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Quote:

A hopefully thoughtful answer

Posted by Dan S. on 02/06/02:

In Reply to: Do you wear a helmet? posted by eco on 02/06/02:

I wear a helmet most of the time (a Shoei Synchrotech, a great lid for a guy who wears glasses). But not always. On some occasions I wear a bandanna around my head and a set of prescription goggles (real motorcycle quality, not the cheesy ones sold in the back of some bike rags).

I accept that riding with a helmet reduces my risk of head injury. I must, however, weigh that risk against both the reward (comfort, enjoyment) of riding without the helmet, the actual degree of risk reduction, and the remaining risk to reach my decision.

On that: the overall risk of being killed while riding is about 1/1000 per year (0.1% death rate). Having a license, some experience, and being sober reduce this risk by at least 50%, perhaps more. That gets me to 1/2000 per year (0.05% death rate). About 1/3 of all motorcycle fatalities result from head injuries, so if I assume that helmets are 100% effective at preventing fatal head injuries (an assumption highly favorable to the helmet), I can estimate that my risk of death drops to perhaps .036%/year if I always wear a lid.

But...first, I note that the risk of riding, even with a helmet, is considerably greater than the risk I remove by electing to wear one. I must therefore ask, if I am putting on a helmet to reduce my risk, does the helmet reduce my risk enough to make the risk acceptable? Is the risk already acceptable, even without the helmet? The annual death rate among adult US citizens is about 1%/year. So, by riding, even without a helmet, I still have a 95% chance of dying of something other than a crash this year (disease, heart trouble, cancer are the big three). To me this says that riding, with or without a helmet, simply doesn't pose enough risk to be at the top of my "modify this behavior to stay alive longer" list. (Note here that I don't smoke, I'm not particularly overweight, I exercise regularly and have very good cholesterol and blood pressure; otherwise my risk of death from "natural causes" would be even higher).

What about the "social burden"? It's largely a crock. The cliche of the guy who becomes a vegetable as a result of a motorcycle crash is mostly fiction--the nature of a motorcycle accident with head injury is that the victim tends to either recover or die. Most of the "vegetables" today are the result of botched surgery, gunshot, drowing or suffocation, not the kind of blunt trauma associated with a bike crash.

Further, if we accept the "social burden" argument for helmets--that is, you don't HAVE to ride without a helmet, therefore, to the lid should be mandatory to save society money--then we must also accept the same argument for the outright banning of all motorcycles. After all, 2/3 of the fatal and serious injuries in motorcycle accidents are to something other than the head (the most costly, of course, are crippling spinal injuries). Since nobody really HAS to ride a motorcycle, by this argument bikes should simply be outlawed.

And in a consistent world, if we're going to outlaw an activity that increases your risk of death by about .016%/year, we should restrict all other activities that are riskier--say farewell to alcohol, tobacco, fast food, etc...

As for insurance, I think it's unfair to single out this one activity for denying coverage. We should either develop an individualized risk profile and premium for each person (e.g., I pay relatively little for insurance against smoking-related illness, a littlemore because I ride a motorcycle, and a lot because my parents had heart disease--those hereditary factors are always the biggest indicator), OR simply average out the risk and minimize the overhead of offering insurance by giving everybody the same coverage (no exclusions) and charging the same premium.

That's my two cents.

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Ahhhh, statistics

Posted by Blake on 02/07/02:

In Reply to: A hopefully thoughtful answer posted by Dan S. on 02/06/02:

Dan: I'm not sure where you got your stats. They certainly are scary. One out of every 1000 motorcyclists dies in a motorcycle related accident every year?

There is one MAJOR flaw in your discussion. The stats reflect the fact that the majority of motorcyclists DO wear a helmet. The death rate and the deaths due to head injury would increase SIGNIFICANTLY if no one were wearing a helmet.

Still, just using your stats as is...

For an even more sobering perspective try calculating the risk over a lifetime of riding, say 40 years.

With a helmet: 0.036%/yr x 40 years = 1.44%. That gives you a 1/69 chance of dying on a bike over 40 years of riding if you wear a helmet.

If you don't wear a helmet: Hmmm, well we don't have stats to actually tell us what the death rate would be. Since most riders do wear helmets most of the time we have no way of knowing how many deaths were avoided thanks to helmets. It is VERY innacurate and completely biased, but let's use your stats for actual head injury deaths.

0.05% x 40 years = 2% = 1/50

You would have a 1/50 chance of being killed in a motorcycle accident if you wear/don't-wear a helmet as much as the average rider.

I would offer that without helmets the death rate would jump from 0.1%/yr to as high as 0.5%/yr, five times the actual rate you stated.

Your chances of being killed while riding would then jump to 1/10 over a 40 year riding career. How do those odds look to you?

The bottom line like you also imply is that we are all rolling the dice no matter what safety gear we use.

I'll take the 1/69 odds and leave the 1/10 bet for others less astute. Besides, I'm WAY more comfortable in my Shoei Z-II, than without it. WAY too many bugs in East Texas to go without a full face helmet.

That said, I ABSOLUTELY do NOT want the guberment tellin' me I gotta wear a helmet!

Blake (veryseldomrideswithoutalid)

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Regarding Statistics (long)

Posted by Dan S. on 02/07/02:

In Reply to: Ahhhh, statistics posted by Blake on 02/07/02:

My stats were taken from the state of Illinois publication on motorcycle death statistics. It's a few years old. The numbers have probably gotten lower since then, largely because the riding population has aged and old farts like me don't take as many dumb chances as the younger guys (in part because I'm more conservative, in part because I've gotten better at recognizing the difference between a dumb chance and a smart chance).

The important thing to recognize is that Illinois has never had any helmet law of any sort (not even an under-18 or beginner law), and by an informal count on a summer afternoon, at least half the riders exercise their freedom of choice. I may not agree with them, but the point is that this sample is not one in which you can say that "the 5% that doesn't wear helmets has 99% of the deaths."

Some other statistical anomalies that suggest helmet LAWS are ineffective--first, the AMA periodically publishes the deaths/registrations figures from all 50 states. If you run down and group them by helmet law/no helmet law, you find no pattern emerges. The average death rate is the same for both groups (some years even slightly lower for the "no adult helmet law" group), the variance is about the same for both groups, and both groups include states that are significantly above and below the average. In terms of statistical meaning, this indicates no statistically significant connection between helmet law and death rates.

A second statistical anomaly comes from a study of states that passed/repealed helmet laws, and again the bottom line is that there's no consistent pattern. Some states see an increase in death rate after repeal; some have seen an increase in death rate after passage; some have seen reductions after each event. Even stranger, some states have seen fluctuations several times the maximum estimated effect of a law--remember the rule of 1/3: if helmets are 100% effective, then passing a helmet law will cut the fatality rate by no more than 1/3, yet in some states the rate dropped by substantially more. Go figure. Again, applying statistical confidence tests leads to the conclusion that there is no meaningful relationship between the passage or repeal of a helmet law and the death rate.

The third oddity came after Wisconsin repealed their adult helmet law. The governor was not a fan of the repeal, and ordered the state police to keep statistics on cause of death and injury, particularly head vs. other body part, and whether the victim was wearing a helmet. Now, if helmets are effective, then we should see a shift in the proportions--the group wearing helmets should see a smaller proportion of deaths/injuries because of head trauma, because the helmets are protecting them. At the end of the study, the results were again no significant correlation--the fraction of deaths, severe injuries and minor injuries to head vs. rest of body were within 1-2% of each other for the helmeted/non-helmeted populations.

What's going on here? My suspicion is that there are other factors that are so much more important to motorcycle safety--riding habits, alcohol/drugs, fatigue, road conditions, weather, training, attitude, and good ol' random luck, phase of the moon (I am NOT kidding; there are more accidents on a full moon, perhaps because more people are out on the road when there's light at night), to name a few--that the benefit of helmet use is simply lost in the noise.

And this brings me to the major problem I have with helmet laws--they represent an "automotive" solution to the question of safety, not a "motorcycle" solution. By this I mean, the people who lobby for helmet laws like to draw parallels to seat belt laws. But there's a huge difference--the car is, in effect, a "whole body helmet," a two-ton (or nine-ton, if you drive a Ford Excursion) suit of armor. If you're properly secured (belts, airbags, etc.) that lump of iron can take a hell of a whack. There's no way you can carry such armor on your person. There is a practical limit to wearable crush zones (that's the padding in your lid) and it's about one inch. Compare that with the three-four feet of crush built into the front end of a car.

So it's my contention that "passive" safety technology (the suit-of-armor approach) is so limited for street riders that it's just about useless--yet, it is the government's preferred approach, because it assumes a passive population (and the government loves a passive population). Far more effective, in my view, is an "active" approach to safety, which involves training people to recognize risky situations and make the slight adjustments needed to stay out of them. We all know somebody who's ridden a kazillion miles and never had a crash (despite the cliche that there are only those who've crashed and those who will, there are a lot of people out there who simply rack up the miles and don't crash)--and some of these guys, it seems, never even have a close call! And it's not that they ride like wimps--a lot of them are on sportbikes and have worn the edges off their tires. What do they know that we don't? And how can we learn??

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Missing the truth for love of statistics.

Posted by Blake on 02/07/02:

In Reply to: Regarding Statistics (long) posted by Dan S. on 02/07/02:

Dan: Besides ignoring my point, you also fail to recognize that death isn't the only undesirable outcome that a helmet will prevent. A broken face, scrapes/cuts, chipped teeth, concusion, hideous disfigurement, and even brain damage are a few of the other undesirable consequences that a full face helmet is able to prevent.

You really need to try to understand my point in my post above. Using your statistics, death rates over a forty year career would be one in seventy for helmeted versus one in ten for non-helmeted riders. That alone should convince anyone of the merits of a helmet.

I wonder what the odds are for "serious injury" for helmeted and non-helmeted riders.

Also consider that what you are really saying when you state that "So it's my contention that "passive" safety technology (the suit-of-armor approach) is so limited for street riders that it's just about useless..." is... "I don't think I'll be involved in a serious wreck." Cause I think you will agree, that if you knew for certain that you were going to be in a serious wreck, you would elect to be wearing a helmet and full leathers at the time. So by not wearing a helmet, a person is simply gambling. It's that simple.

I agree, there are many OTHER factors affecting death rates for motorcycle riders. The best solution is to avoid a wreck in the first place right? But that is really a separate issue.

Like I said, while I choose to almost always wear a full face helmet, I am NO proponent of helmet laws. Let freedom reign!

I've had one serious wreck in my 24 year riding career; my dad has had one also. In both cases our helmets saved our noggins from significant injury. His probably saved his life.

Trying to justify the use of helmets by spouting statistics is silly. Use your common sense man. If your head is at risk of hitting something at high speed, it's probably worth having a helmet to protect your face and head.

You are not seeing the forest, just dwelling on the trees. Forget the helmet law studies and their statistics. There is so much more to logic and prudence than vague statistics. For the stats to be meaningful, we'd have to know the percentage of accidents for helmeted/non-helmeted riders for a significant population sample over a significant (more than one year?) duration. We would need to know how many total riders our data includes and the total miles ridden. There's no real way to responsibly take the few stats you've profered to a responsible conclusion.

I saw a kid fall 3 feet from a railing and crack his head open, nearly killed him. If he had been wearing a helmet, he would have walked away laughing about it. You are a smart guy, weigh the risks; if riding helmetless is worth the risk to you, then by all means do it. But, please don't delude yourself into believing that you are not significantly increasing your risk for serious injury or death.

This is a good discussion. I think I'll start a similar thread on the BadWeB quick board.

Later,

Blake

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