Do You Always Need to Wear a Helmet to Ride a Bike?
One morning before the pandemic, I hopped on my town bike, a 1956 Schwinn Tornado, and cruised 10 minutes to the coffee shop. I did not wear a helmet. I sipped an espresso, high-fived some friends, and excavated my inbox. Then I rode home and kitted up for a road ride. On the way out the door, I grabbed my helmet off the hook and plopped it on my head.
If you’ve ever ridden a bike without a helmet, you’ve likely run into helmet scolds. They’ll tell you at length why you should never ride without one, about the risks and dangers. Don’t you know cycling is perilous, even for seasoned riders? They’ll come armed with statistics and tell you about that one time they crashed unexpectedly while pedaling around the block.
Are helmet advocates right? Should we always wear a helmet when we ride?
Do You Need a Helmet to Ride?
Forbes contributor Carlton Reid doesn’t think so. In a column published in 2018, Reid lists the many activities he does without a helmet. He walks on icy sidewalks and cleans the gutters on his roof. If we don’t wear helmets for these daily but potentially deadly tasks, he argues, we shouldn’t bother when we ride a bike. The expectation that we should only adds extra barriers to cycling.
Reid’s analogies make light of a complex issue, but he veers into flippancy. Take, for example, the question of injury prevention. A February 2017 analysis in the International Journal of Epidemiology reviewed 40 separate studies and found helmet use significantly reduced the odds of head injury. They also found the odds of a fatal head injury to be lower when cyclists wore a helmet.
The writers noted, however, that helmet use does not eliminate the risk of injury entirely. You probably already know that bike helmets, in their current iteration, only go so far. Maybe you’ve suffered a concussion while wearing one, or know someone who has. Helmet designers initially focused on the problem of preventing skull fractures, while concussion risks have been understood less clearly.
Are Bike Helmets Safe?
We know now that the concussion risk is very real for cyclists. In 2013 The New York Times reported that cycling had the highest concussion rate among all sports, including American football. Pro Alison Tetrick revealed the long journey she’s traveled after two TBIs during her professional road racing career. In some cases, the effects of a concussion can linger for years. Often, they’re permanent.
Compared to the possibility of a life-altering injury, putting on a helmet doesn’t seem like a great chore. If it will help protect against a brain injury, many riders feel that’s reason enough to wear one every time they climb on a bike. Newer designs that combine different materials and use technologies such as MIPS, which protects against some torsional impacts, are improving how much helmets help. It’s worth remembering, though, that even the latest and greatest lid isn’t a fail-safe guarantee.
A 2016 analysis by the Toole Design Group charted helmet use against fatality rates across eight countries. Riders in the U.S. had the highest rates of helmet use among the countries included. But American cyclists also had the highest fatality rate per distance traveled. What explains this disparity? We can look to the Dutch for answers. Famous for its extensive and quality bike lanes, the Netherlands reported both the lowest rates of helmet use and the lowest fatality rates.
Little wonder that advocacy groups in the U.S. focus so much energy on improving
.While helmets can help mitigate specific head injuries when a crash happens, organizations such as People for Bikes want to find ways to prevent those crashes—especially collisions between cars and bikes—from happening at all.
A 2019 report by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that 75 percent of cyclist deaths occurred in urban areas. (There were more than 800 cycling deaths in 2019 overall.) But only a small percentage of those fatalities take place in a bike lane. If you really want to make your road rides safer, joining your local advocacy group, or organizing one to push your city and state for better bike networks, is a great place to start. Simply donning a helmet is no substitute for safer streets.
You may still decide to wear a helmet on every ride, but becoming a helmet scold could dissuade new riders from picking up cycling—and ultimately make you less safe. When helmet use became mandatory in New Zealand, for example, the number of bike trips fell. Available evidence suggests that more riders on the road make us all safer, because drivers become more attuned to cyclists and drive more carefully. It also means more cyclists advocating for more and better bike lanes.
Your Level of Risk
As cyclists, we constantly make decisions about risk. My trip to the coffee shop is a mellow ramble along roads that have bike lanes or minimal traffic. My slow-moving town bike offers plenty of reaction time. It feels only slightly less safe than walking.
My road ride that same day involved a higher level of perceived risk. I rode down high-speed descents, along roads without bike lanes, amid fast-moving traffic, over bad pavement, and near parked cars. All these elements added up to a ride that felt less safe—and that available studies tell me was, in fact, less safe. It made sense for me to take more precautions under those conditions, in the same way that ripping singletrack on a mountain bike does. (Even Reid, of Forbes, admits that he wears a helmet when mountain biking.)
It’s up to you to consider the risks and make your own decisions about when to wear a helmet. Maybe that means every time you bike, maybe it doesn’t. I’m not here scold you for your choices. I just want to see you out there enjoying the ride.
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