Montreal City Weblog

Kate 09:12 on 2024-08-06 Permalink Reply  

• Ian 09:55 on 2024-08-06 Permalink

  Bike helmet laws may limit bike use, but brain injuries are a cost borne by society at large.

  Normalizing helmet usage is a nice start, let’s talk about normalizing not blowing through red lights or looking at your phone while you ride – both very common behaviours on Mile End bike path routes, anyhow.

  Blowing a light while looking at your phone, not wearing a helmet? Sounds like the sort of things that actually should be seriously suppressed, no? I know if a driver regularly blew lights while looking at their phone, everyone would be (rightly) up in arms.

• Ephraim 10:12 on 2024-08-06 Permalink

  @Ian – I can’t understand those who are on their phones and biking… but sometimes they have kids on seats behind them. You need to model the behaviour that you want from car drivers. You don’t want a car driver on his phone, well… don’t do it on your bike. (Especially with a baby in the seat behind you!)

• Chris 11:09 on 2024-08-06 Permalink

  >Bike helmet laws may limit bike use, but brain injuries are a cost borne by society at large.

  Lots of things are costs borne by society at large. Like car pollution. If we have to bear that, we can bear cyclist not wearing helmets.

• MarcG 11:19 on 2024-08-06 Permalink

  Running the wrong way with the ball

• SnootBoop 12:04 on 2024-08-06 Permalink

  https://theconversation.com/safety-vests-and-helmets-make-cyclists-look-less-human-to-other-road-users-207413

• Ian 18:58 on 2024-08-06 Permalink

  Lol whut? OK fine, your brain injury. Have fun.
  @Chris amazing equivalency, you have fun without a bike helmet then, too.

  When I lived on Jeanne-Mance, a street with a northbound bike lane on the left and a southbound bike lane on the right, I would regularly see people biking at night, no hands, no helmet, on their phones, going the wrong way down the middle of the street. It takes a real galaxy brain to think that telling people not to do this kind of thing is somehow anti-bike.

• Nicholas 20:53 on 2024-08-06 Permalink

  The national burden for traumatic brain injuries is higher in Canada than the Netherlands, where bicycle usage is way higher and helmet usage outside children and racing bikes is essentially non-existent. We drive more than the Dutch and have more cars than them, and yet we still have more roadway deaths per capita, per vehicle and per vehicle kilpmetre driven. The biggest predictor of roadway deaths is number of kilometres driven my cars and trucks. It’s almost as if cycling (with or without a helmet) isn’t the dangerous activity.

  Helmet usage by drivers, passengers and pedestrians is also basically zero, even though most people who suffer traumatic brain injuries on the roadways fall into those categories. I bet if we mandated helmets for walking people would strictly be safer when walking than now, but would also walk less and drive more, so we’d all be less safe overall.

  Wear a helmet if you want, no one will stop you. But if you ask the people in the safest country in the world for cycling whether people should be ticketed for not wearing a helmet so as to improve safety, they’ll laugh at you. I’ve seen it.

• Blork 20:55 on 2024-08-06 Permalink

  That safety vest article is a straw man. It assumes people in vests and helmets are actually TARGETED by drivers. The real problem is that drivers often DON’T SEE the cyclist AT ALL, not that they don’t see them as “human.”

  Chris: another straw man. While you’re right that the effects of car pollution are borne by the population at large, that’s why there are emission control laws and standards, which are enforced (somewhat). Those enforcements and emission control devices are parallel with helmet laws.

  “Blowing through red lights” is also a bit of a straw man. There are so many variables there that you can’t reduce the whole thing down to one statement. As a life-long cyclist I’ve “blown through” thousands of red lights. In my case (and in many cyclists cases) one only “blows” the red light when one has slowed down, assessed the cross traffic, and then proceeds through when there is zero risk. As in, an approaching cross vehicle does not even need to take their foot off the accelerator because they’re so far away. Basically a “Denver stop” which is legitimate.

  Blowing through red lights without looking, or when there is cross traffic of cars, bikes, or pedestrians: No. Never.

  Cycling while phoning or texting? No. Never; especially texting, where both your mind AND your eyes are not on the road. Fine the f*ck out of them.

  Final note: people are stupid. My mind is regularly boggled by the stupidity of pedestrians, cyclists, and car drivers. Everyone has a responsibility to themselves and to society to be alert and aware and to not always assume you are safe just because you feel entitled to safety.

  In particular I am regularly boggled by people I see riding with their kids (either in carriers or in those kid trailers) in dangerous conditions seemingly without a care in the world. Like riding down pothole-filled ave. du Parc at rush hour with a kid strapped to your bike. Or racing down a curvy gravel path on Mont-Royal at 40kph while towing a kid in a trailer. Or cycling across Sherbrooke street at rush hour while texting with two kids strapped to a cargo bike. I’ve seen all that.

• Ian 21:12 on 2024-08-06 Permalink

  @Blork by “blowing through a light” I don’t just mean crossing against a red, I mean blowing thorugh assuming everyone else will get out of your way, pedestrians and cars alike. Of course I’ve crossed reds on a bike, everyone does. In a car? Never.

  @Nicholas I have spent lots of time in the Netherlands too, I have family in Groningen.

  Montreal is not the Netherlands.

  You want to ride without a helmet, go for it, lol. I was a daily bike commuter for decades with the scars to show for it – I may have blown out my knees & been doored several times, but no brain injuries, thanks. I don’t know anyone in Montreal that rides/ rode on the regular without injuries. But yeah, sure, helmets are for dopes. You can laugh all the way to the hospital. Thinning the herd, I guess.

• Rennie 16:11 on 2024-08-07 Permalink

  You mind your business, I’ll mind mine is a good rule to live by. Even for internet busybodies who like to tell other people how to live their lives.

• Chris 18:16 on 2024-08-07 Permalink

  >When I lived on Jeanne-Mance […] It takes a real galaxy brain to think that telling people not to do this kind of thing is somehow anti-bike.

  Ian, no one here argued being against all these things is “anti-bike”.

  >But yeah, sure, helmets are for dopes.

  Ian, no one argued that either.

  You seem to be conflating anti-mandatory-helmet with anti-helmet.

  Nicholas: well said!

  >While you’re right that the effects of car pollution are borne by the population at large, that’s why there are emission control laws and standards, which are enforced (somewhat).

  Ha! “Somewhat” indeed. Enforced so much that said emissions have increased for every decade for a century.

  >Those enforcements and emission control devices are parallel with helmet laws.

  Society has decided many deaths from car pollution is ok. We can likewise decide that some cyclist deaths from lack of mandatory helmet use is ok too.

  Biking without a helmet does no harm to anyone else, except sure some cost to taxpayers funding universal heath care. But so does overeating, not exercising, smoking, etc., etc.

  What about joggers? Should we mandate they wear helmets too, in case a car hits them? Anything but fix the real problem (cars) I guess!

• Ian 18:29 on 2024-08-07 Permalink

  It’s not a zero sum game, we can do both.

  But get this mind-bender – you can actually hurt yourself just falling off your bike, like slipping on ice, or having a blowout, or wiping out in gravel, or hitting a steel plate covering roadwork – in fact I have done all 3 and would have had a serious head injury each time had I not been wearing a helmet. Joggers tend not to have those issues.

  Road safety laws exist because they reflect the need to prevent injury from clear and immediate danger. If you want to make this about the existence of cars and climate change and lifestyle choices that’s just rabbitholing, and again, false equivalencies. (Massive brain trauma) != (long-term health effects from air pollution).

• Chris 17:52 on 2024-08-08 Permalink

  Joggers absolutely do wipe out and hurt themselves. Why not require they wear helmets? After all, “road safety laws exist because they reflect the need to prevent injury from clear and immediate danger.”

  In a free society, sometimes individual choice trumps other considerations.

  You like that individual choice when it allows you to drive your polluting car around, but you abhor it when other make their choices.

• Ian 17:59 on 2024-08-08 Permalink

  No, you have me all wrong. I fully support your individual choice to go brain yourself. Don’t let me stop you. I stilll think you are making foolish false equivalencies and now grasping at straws and resorting to ad hominem, but hey, no point arguing with thoe who won’t be swayed, right?
  The point of this conversation was not my moral stance on helmets (which would be weird) but trying to explain why the public safety laws that are there exist.
  Heck, go skateboard down the mountain in a ballcap and swim trunks if yiou want, I’m not stopping you.