Episode 179: Fine, We’re Doing a Helmet Episode 

 

Sarah Goodyear: So Doug, the weather here in New York this late summer and early fall has been tropical.

Doug Gordon: Yeah, we live in Miami now. I feel like every day starting at 2:00, 3:00, 4:00 pm, there’s just a downpour of biblical proportions.

Sarah: Right. I’m finding myself just taking rain protection with me wherever I go, because it seems like the skies can open up at any time.

Doug: Well, we have the perfect product for people who like to stay dry and happy when they are out doing what they’re doing and that 3:00 pm downpour happens.

Sarah: That’s right, because you don’t want to just stop life because it’s raining, because in New York, at least now, if you do that, then you’re not gonna …

Doug: You wouldn’t go outside.

Sarah: You wouldn’t go outside. So what I do is I have my nice Cleverhood. I stuff it into its own pocket, throw it in whatever bag I’m carrying. Then when the skies open up and everybody else is running around or buying a $5 umbrella from a street vendor, I’m already in my Cleverhood. Dry.

Doug: And happy.

Sarah: Yes.

Doug: I wonder, those guys with the umbrellas, they seem to pop out of nowhere as soon as it starts raining. Maybe we need the folks at Cleverhood to just magically pop around the city and sell you a Rover rain cape as soon as there’s the slightest drop of rain. Susan from Cleverhood just pops out of the nearest subway and is like, “I got your Cleverhoods right here.”

Sarah: Just a thought.

Doug: If you want to save 15 percent off the best rain gear for walking and cycling, go to Cleverhood.com/waroncars, and enter code DRYANDHAPPY at checkout. Again, that’s Cleverhood.com/waroncars, code DRYANDHAPPY.

 

Doug: Sarah, I have a question for you.

Sarah: Okay.

Doug: Do you wear a bicycle helmet and why?

Sarah: Not always. And when I wear it, it’s because I like my brain. And when I don’t wear it, it’s because I think that I’m cycling under conditions that are safe enough that I don’t need it. All right, Doug, I’ll ask you. Do you wear a bike helmet?

Doug: I do, but mostly so that if I’m killed while riding my bicycle, the news stories don’t say, “The cyclist wasn’t wearing a helmet.” This is The War on Cars. I’m Doug Gordon, and with me in the studio is my co-host, Sarah Goodyear.

Sarah: Hey there!

Doug: We’re back.

Sarah: We are. We’re so back.

Doug: We took a little break this summer—much needed—from our book tour.

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Doug: But this is the first time we are in the studio together in quite a long time. And today we are taking on the subject of bicycle helmets. Finally.

Sarah: Are we really gonna do this?

Doug: If you can believe it, we are approaching the podcast’s eighth birthday at the end of this month, and we have never done a helmet episode.

Sarah: It’s hard to believe. Have we been chicken?

Doug: Maybe.

Sarah: [laughs] Okay.

Doug: Maybe we have. It’s a really thorny subject, as we’re gonna talk about. And in fact, the reason for us doing this episode now is because it blew up last week, essentially, as we’re recording this, so we wanted to kind of dive into the facts about helmets and bicycle safety. More importantly, we’re gonna dive into the larger philosophical questions, sort of a meta conversation about conversations about bicycle helmets and safety. Sort of put your helmet on because we’re gonna get into the discourse, and your brains could leak out of your ears in a moment.

Sarah: But first, some business. We are on Patreon at Patreon.com/thewaroncarspod. You can also buy our book, Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile, from your favorite independent bookseller or wherever you get your books.

Doug: Speaking of the book, we have some more book-related events, even though the book tour, we have said, is mostly over. We actually are going back out. Later this month, we’re gonna be in North Carolina. We’re gonna then go to the UK. We’re going to London and Oxford in October. Then we will be in Tampa, St. Pete. We’re gonna be at a book festival in Nashville at Vanderbilt University. You can go to LifeAfterCars.com for the full schedule.

Sarah: Yeah, and we also have big news about our return to Hunter College show.

Doug: Yes. Friday, November 6, we are gonna be back at Hunter College. We were there last year with our friend Ray Delehanty of CityNerd fame. We have a really great guest for this show. We’re super excited to get her on the live show.

Sarah: And we can announce it now?

Doug: We can.

Sarah: Okay. So on Friday, November 6 …

Doug: Janette Sadik-Khan will be joining us on stage live at Hunter College. Former DOT Transportation Commissioner, sort of the patron saint of our movement. Could not be more honored, thrilled, excited that she’s gonna be there. Janette has been such a huge supporter of us, of the book. And of course, we’ll have a lot to talk about. It’s also gonna be the one-year anniversary, or thereabouts—a little after—of the book’s publication, and about 10 or so months into the Mamdani era. So we’re gonna have a lot to talk about with Janette.

Sarah: Yeah. And we’ll have another special guest at that show too. Pondless is gonna be there as well.

Doug: The musical stylings of Pondless.

Sarah: Yeah, synth pop for urbanists. So we’ll have lots of fun at that show.

Doug: We will put a link to get tickets in the show notes. Get ’em, because I think they’re gonna go fast.

Sarah: Oh yeah, for sure.

Doug: Before we get going, I think it’s important to lay a few things out. Now my cold open answer there was a little glib and short and whatever, but I think it is probably important for us to say whether we do or don’t wear helmets, and you gave a really great answer that, like, you do, and then there are situations where maybe you don’t.

Sarah: And my answer was a little brief too, because there are other times that I don’t wear a helmet that are not just when I’m in a more controlled and safe environment, but it’s for reasons of convenience sometimes.

Doug: I wear a helmet in New York City most of the time, because as I sometimes joke about, I’ll say there are a lot of things conspiring to throw me off of my bicycle.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Doug: Car doors, potholes, random debris in the street, a dog leash, right? Someone’s walking, the dog runs out when you’re in the park, whatever it is. There are a lot of things that, like, it would be good for me to have a helmet in the event I went down. When I ride an e-bike, almost a hundred percent of the time, because I’m going faster, I wear a helmet.

Doug: But there are times when I take the subway into the city, and then I’m like, you know what? The subways are kind of messed up, or I just feel like biking home, or there’s no easy way to get from where I’m going on one side of the city to the other, and I grab a Citi Bike. And I don’t wear a helmet because that’s kind of the point of a Citi Bike.

Sarah: Yeah, that’s probably my main instance of not using a helmet. And it happened to me just the other day, and it was an e-Citi Bike because I was on the subway, the subway failed, and I needed to get home. And there was a huge storm incoming—as there often is in New York these days. And so I got an e-bike and went across the Manhattan Bridge on that, and I was not wearing a helmet. And, you know, I have to say, I felt a little uncomfortable not having a helmet in that situation when I was trying to get home fast. I was going fast, and I realized this is a situation where it might be really good to have a helmet, and I don’t. And I felt kind of stupid.

Doug: Well, and the thing is—and we’ll get into this—a lot of the benefits of helmets come from bike-on-bike crashes. Have you ever been in a crash where a helmet made a difference, in your opinion?

Sarah: No.

Doug: So I have.

Sarah: Okay.

Doug: I was on a group training ride over the bridge in New Jersey. And we were coming back. I was at the front; I was leading the ride. This was a long time ago, over 20 years ago. And we were going through an intersection. There was a long line of us coming through. And a driver, I think, decided that she didn’t want to wait for the cyclists to just go through before she turned. And she tried to turn in front of all of us. I was in the front. She hit me. I went over her hood. Thankfully, it was a very slow, low-speed crash. She stopped. I rolled off the front. Thank God it wasn’t an SUV. This was a long time ago. And my helmet was cracked.

Sarah: Oh, wow!

Doug: So I went to the hospital just to get checked out. I was fine. But yeah, I looked at that helmet and I thought, man, that would have been my head. That would have been a concussion or much worse. So I’m glad I had it. However, of course, I was on a sports training ride, right? I wasn’t just biking from the drugstore to my doctor’s office or something like that.

Sarah: Right.

Doug: So when I’m in a kind of fitness situation, recreational like that, I’m gonna wear a helmet. That’s one way of saying please don’t rush to the comments, emails, social media, as if you’ve stopped listening to anything we’re saying after this. Because part of what confounds me, angers me, confuses me, or really irritates a lot of people when we talk about this is the minute you mention helmets and institutional efforts to improve bicycle safety, people stop listening. They just say you should wear a helmet, end of discussion. That’s it.

Sarah: Right.

Doug: And that’s tough. That’s a hard environment in which to have a nuanced conversation, social media, of course, being the worst offender in that regard. It can be really tricky to talk about this, and so I want to make it very clear that if you wear a helmet, if a helmet saved your life, or prevented serious injury. Good.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: Please wear a helmet. We are not yet at a place in most cities in the United States, North America, England—you know, this isn’t Amsterdam indeed. Wear a helmet.

Doug: On the other hand, if you don’t wear a helmet for whatever reason, because you take casual rides, you’re going eight miles an hour on a really heavy cargo trike, whatever it is, we’re not shaming you. If you don’t, as you just said, Sarah, and as I mentioned about Citi Bike, there are times when we don’t wear helmets. I have a big Dutch cargo bike, and I struggle to go eight miles an hour. If I were to fall off of that thing, it would be no different than falling basically while walking or running, and I don’t wear a helmet while I’m walking or running. So I don’t always wear a helmet when I’m on that bicycle.

Sarah: I have to say that the closest I’ve ever come to a serious head injury was tubing down a hill in a ski resort. You know, I was on a tube and I wiped out at the end and I hit my head pretty hard. And nobody said that I had to wear a helmet for that. Maybe they should have.

Doug: Well, people do wear ski helmets now pretty much everywhere.

Sarah: Well, but this wasn’t—this was just a thing you do with your kids if you’re not skiing. So I think that yes, there are plenty of instances, and people talk also about why don’t we wear helmets when we’re in the car because, you know, actually a lot of injuries that happen to people when they crash their cars are head injuries.

Doug: Not just a lot. I think the number one injury in a car crash is a traumatic brain injury. But there are other safety systems within cars. People, you know, will get all defensive about that, but we have airbags, seat belts, et cetera.

Sarah: Right.

Doug: You know, so again, like, please don’t “@” us right away of, like, you guys just don’t want anyone to wear a helmet. That’s not what this is about.

Sarah: It’s complicated. What this is about is how complicated it is, right?

Doug: Yes. Yeah. And so I think what we’re gonna do for this episode is we’re gonna run through some of the stats. We are then gonna have that meta conversation. But I want to stop for a moment and reflect on what we just talked about. And here’s a question I have for you, Sarah.

Sarah: Okay.

Doug: This is something I talked about with Jessie Singer. Her book, There Are No Accidents, is a big source for this episode, and the research she did. She has a whole chapter on bicycle helmets and individual responsibility, and how bicycle helmets can be used as a mechanism for individual blame.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Doug: Is there any other form of advocacy that we do or that other people you know do where you have to issue all of these qualifiers about your own personal behavior before you start talking about larger institutional solutions to that problem your advocacy is trying to solve?

Sarah: Well, I …

Doug: You can say no, by the way.

Sarah: [laughs] I mean, not really.

Doug: For me, what comes up is guns.

Sarah: Hmm.

Doug: Liberals, progressives typically have to say things like, “Look, I’m a gun owner myself, or I respect the Second Amendment. However, I think we need sensible gun control. And here’s why. Because it’s a public safety, public health crisis in our country.”

Doug: However, I think it’s different from bicycle helmets in that usually when progressives say, “Look, I’m in favor of the Second Amendment, or I understand people really care about their guns,” they’re doing it to cover their asses politically, right? They can’t come out and say just ban the fucking guns, right? There are those of us who would like to say that and who do, but then there are elected officials who know, like, maybe I’d like to say that, but if I did, I’d be toast.

Sarah: Right.

Doug: And so there’s the political side of that. I think there’s some of that with bicycle helmets a little bit. The politics are there, for sure. But again, none of this is a perfect one-to-one analogy, and that’s what makes it, I think, so complicated. I call it the “look-but” phenomenon. Like, “Look, I all know we have to do X, but …”

Sarah: Right.

Doug: And it’s a really difficult needle to thread for some people. I mentioned Jessie Singer. One of the things she talks about in her book is how the presence or absence of a bicycle helmet following a crash is often noted regardless of the circumstances of the crash. She talks about a very good friend of hers who was killed by the driver of a BMW, which weighed 3,500 pounds, who was on a bike path he wasn’t supposed to be on that was not open to cars.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: And the driver, I believe, also was drunk. And her friend was killed.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: And the New York Times, in its coverage, noted that the cyclist was not wearing a helmet. As if that would protect you from a 3,500-pound car going Lord knows how fast in a place it doesn’t belong.

Sarah: And I’m sure we’re gonna get into just how little protection helmets afford in many crashes.

Doug: And that was a 3,500-pound BMW, not a 6,000-pound, let’s say, Cybertruck or Ford F-150. That is a lot of table setting. You know, we really had to do that. And again, that’s part of the madness of this conversation is you have to lay that all out there. But why are we finally doing this episode now? I think we can sum this up in two words: Thanks, Mamdani.

Sarah: Oh, yeah. It’s all down to Zohran again, isn’t it?

Doug: Yeah. Credit? Blame? I don’t know.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: So last month, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani posted a video on social media where he responded to people who had seen him riding around the city without a bike helmet. So it shows him looking at all these comments on social media about, “Hey, where’s your helmet, buddy?”

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Zohran Mamdani: You’re right. I’ve gotta do better.]

Doug: And he takes a box from a closet, opens it up, and there’s a glowing bicycle helmet.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Zohran Mamdani: Safety first, New York. See you out there.]

Doug: Yeah, it says, “Safety first, New York. See you out there.”

Sarah: Yeah, and the soundtrack, “Stayin’ Alive.”

Doug: Yep. So that was it. He didn’t say we’re passing a mandatory helmet law. He didn’t say when you’re out there, you should wear a helmet. He just said, “Safety first. See you out there, New York.” That’s it.

Sarah: Yep. Modeling good behavior …

Doug: Yes.

Sarah: … is the idea there. You don’t have to lecture.

Doug: What did you think about the video when you first saw it?

Sarah: I thought New York loves this man so much that we want to wrap him in bubble wrap and make sure that nothing happens to him. And I think that’s really sweet. And I’m kind of glad that he’s wearing a helmet.

Doug: I have a slightly different take.

Sarah: Okay!

Doug: I’m glad he did it. It’s great. I think—we’re gonna get into, I think, why the messenger matters a lot.

Sarah: Oh, yeah.

Doug: There’s a little bit of an opportunity cost, right? It’s not like he’s gonna immediately follow up that video with another one about bicycle safety and what he’s doing.

Sarah: Right.

Doug: Although he is doing a lot. Again, we gotta put lots of qualifiers in here. He’s doing tons of great bike project safety work—more than we could have ever hoped for. First of all, he is wrapped in bubble wrap when he goes out. He’s surrounded usually by NYPD and his security detail also on bicycles, or aides who are riding with him, or reporters who are riding with him. So, like, the conditions under which Mamdani is riding around the city are not the same as you and I.

Sarah: Yeah. Or as even they were for him a year ago.

Doug: Right. Number two, part of the reason he is seen sometimes without a helmet is because he’s hopping on a Citi Bike, leaving a meeting. And part of the benefit, as we talked about, about Citi Bike, is the impromptu nature by which you can make the decision to ride or not ride. And it’s not helmet-dependent for most people. It’s the trains are not working, it’s gonna rain later, et cetera. So I had mixed feelings about it, as I think a lot of my fellow advocates did. We’re gonna get to that.

Sarah: Okay.

Doug: This post was then pretty much immediately followed by the New York City Department of Transportation posting on X, which gross, guys, get off of that.

Sarah: Yeah, don’t do it.

Doug: Don’t. Stop. They posted a notification about one of their free helmet giveaways, which again, it’s one of those complicated things where it’s like, great, you know, like if that’s a barrier to someone cycling and $30 for a helmet, $40 for a helmet is too much for a low-income person, and it’s gonna be all that separates them from getting on a bicycle and riding to work or whatever, cool. I’m glad the city is giving them out. I have issues with the fact that the helmets are branded as Vision Zero. Folks, Vision Zero has not put Vision Zero on a helmet. It’s not helmets at all.

Sarah: Helmets are not part of Vision Zero.

Doug: No, that’s literally not part of Vision Zero. But again, I’m largely in favor of the DOT program. I think it’s good. Then what really kicked things off was that in response to the mayor’s video, our friends at Streetsblog posted a story titled, “A Helmet Won’t Save Mayor Mamdani From a Crash.” I was quoted in there. Jessie Singer was quoted in there. Ben Furnas, the executive director of Transportation Alternatives, was in there. Ben had a really good point, which is like, this is pretty humorous and cute. He’s—and he’s also mainstreaming cycling.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: Like, here is the mayor in City Hall saying, “See you out there,” and showing pictures of him riding a bicycle for work-related purposes. So yeah, cool. Fine.

Sarah: Right.

Doug: You know, I said I’d rather he focus on institutional solutions. I had a longer interview. This is how the sausage is made.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: And some of my, like, “This is delightful, but also …”

Sarah: Right.

Doug: I mean, look, my reaction to the video is it’s vintage Mamdani, too. Like, this is a mayor who people say, “Hey, dude, there’s a pothole on my street,” and, like, an hour later, after their TikTok video goes up, the pothole has been fixed. He is a politician who responds to his critics, who takes criticism into consideration, and then changes his behavior as a result. And so on the surface, you’d be like, that’s all you could want in an elected official: someone who listens to his constituents and considers the evidence and changes his behavior if needed.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: Great.

Sarah: Yeah, love that.

Doug: So, you know, whatever. Like, it was—I thought the article that Streetsblog posted was fine. They weren’t even saying in there, don’t wear a helmet. They included the statistics about when and how a bike helmet will help you. Where things really started to go off the rails was, you guessed it, on social media.

Sarah: Uh-huh. Yeah.

Doug: Streetsblog posted a link to their story, and they posted it on Bluesky, and the post said, “Mayor Mamdani’s focus on a helmet paints deadly crashes as the failure of vulnerable road users to protect themselves, rather than as the failure of government to stop completely avoidable carnage.”

Sarah: And I, despite my perhaps more mixed feelings than yours about this entire issue, really support that message. And I support it for all the reasons that, you know, we all understand that systemic responses are needed in public health situations, and safety in traffic is a public health issue. We fought really hard to get it defined as a public health issue, and you don’t solve public health problems with PPE alone, right? Or even primarily. You solve public health problems with systemic actions like safer streets, right? Like, that’s how you solve a problem as huge as traffic safety, not through everybody wrapping themselves in bubble wrap.

Doug: What I said in my interview with Streetsblog—and again, no shade to the reporter.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: I know how it’s done. We do it too, where you can’t include everything you get from an interview. Where I might have threaded the needle a little differently with this video is I would have said let’s have the mayor responding to all of those social media posts of, “Hey buddy, where’s your helmet?” with two things. One, you’re right, I gotta do better. Right now, the road conditions are not what we need them to be. So yeah, when I can, I’m gonna wear a helmet, and here it is. And also, here’s a list of all the projects we’re doing, or here’s a good example of one project we’re doing where we’re gonna make it so that you’re not even gonna have to worry about being hit by a car, and we’re gonna put smooth new asphalt and really get our roads up to world-class standards so you don’t have to worry about potholes and things like that. I would have liked to have seen that. So it’s a little bit of American individualism, but also a lot of democratic socialism.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Doug: Because I think the opportunity of just focusing on the helmet opened up this, “Yeah, I see cyclists not wearing helmets all the time!” And what I worry about with stuff like this is Mamdani has the best of intentions. He’s doing the work to make cycling safer. He’s taking parking, he’s doing stuff, he’s dusting off all these old projects that were delayed for totally horrible reasons. So he’s doing the stuff we want him to do.

Doug: But there are elected officials, anti-bike elected officials in this city who have and who will in the future try to pass a mandatory helmet law. And one of the things they’re now gonna be able to say is, “See, even the mayor thinks you should wear a helmet.” And that’s gonna be the end of the discussion because those people don’t want to have the let’s take the parking situation. They want to put all of the blame, all of the responsibility on individuals, none on the institution to actually make the hard choices of parking or people’s lives.

Sarah: And one of the things that was a little bit confounding about the social media reaction was that this sort of embrace of helmets as an individualistic solution to a systemic problem was being advocated for by people who, on other issues, really understand that only systemic responses are effective.

Doug: Yeah. I don’t want to name names because this really isn’t about individuals, but kind of like collective psychosis that happens when you say the words “bicycle helmet.”

Sarah: [laughs] Right.

Doug: But there are some people who I generally think of as exactly that, as the people who think holistically about public health and political problems, who really just failed to address the substance of the Streetsblog article or even the post that they put up. I mean, yeah, you know, sometimes people don’t read the whole article, or they don’t read past the social media posts. But, like, they just failed to engage with a lot of what advocates were saying.

Doug: One media figure I think we all respect told Streetsblog their take was insane and left it at that. No further elaboration. Another posted that anti-helmet cyclists are a real thing and they love to yell, which in all of the responses I saw, nobody was saying I’m anti-helmet. They were saying I’m anti-government making this the focus of bicycle safety. People were comparing Streetsblog to anti-vaxxers. And they said that opposing helmets was like opposing seat belts.

Sarah: Hmm.

Doug: Which I just want to address that for a moment because you hear this all the time.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Doug: I want you to imagine that cars didn’t come standard with seat belts. Cars are exactly the same as they are now, but there are no seat belts. You have to provide your own seat belt and hook it up every time you get into your car, a rental car, a taxi, a Lyft, an Uber.

Sarah: Right.

Doug: You wouldn’t drive as much, because you’d be at the movies and you’d be like, “Oh, I took the bus here. It’s late. Let’s take a Lyft home. I forgot my seat belt. I can’t get in a car.”

Sarah: Yeah. 

Doug: I just don’t think it’s a good comparison when people say, “Oh, this is like being against seat belts.” Bikes don’t come standard with helmets. There’s no bike share system on Earth that could provide enough helmets for everybody who wanted to use them. Some have tried.

Sarah: Yeah, it’s been tried.

Doug: But, like, who wants to wear a helmet that’s been on one thousand people’s heads? You know, are we all carrying around lice spray? I don’t think that’s happening. So it’s just not an analogy that I think really works.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: We don’t individualize the problem of car safety. I mean, we do. We tell people to drive safe. But, like, there are requirements for what cars have to do. And even roads, we understand, like, there are crash barriers and things like that for drivers.

Sarah: Right. And that is a hard-won thing. I mean, what I always think about when I think about helmets and systems is about 25 years ago, I had a Dutch friend who had moved to New York, and she said to me, “I got on my bike.” She bought a bike and she was riding around and was shocked at how dangerous it was. I mean, again, we’re talking 20, 25 years ago. And she was like, “Wow, it’s scary!” But still, she had this reaction where she said, “I see everybody is wearing helmets. Do you fall off of your bike frequently? Do people fall off a lot?”

Doug: [laughs] So she wasn’t even asking, like, “Do you get hit by cars a lot?”

Sarah: No, she literally thought that it meant that Americans were really bad at riding bikes, and that we just would, like, fall off a lot. She couldn’t figure out why you would need a helmet. But her reaction, as someone who had lived her entire life in the Netherlands, was not I’m gonna wear a helmet and feel all better. Her reaction was she actually didn’t ride a bike very much while she was living in New York.

Doug: Yeah, I think that’s the thing is like, if you focus on protective equipment, you are sending a message then that cycling is dangerous and you ultimately are responsible when or if something happens. And we do need to think about what message that sends to the bike curious, let’s say, or the very skeptical, the no ways, no hows. Because everywhere they look, it’s like, oh, you got to have a light, you got to have reflective this, you got to have a helmet. It’s like, wait a minute, what other activity that you could do optionally that’s not a hardcore sport, let’s say, would you need all of this stuff before you go do it? Someone’s gonna email me and say, “Well, actually, here’s that activity.” But you know what I mean, right?

Sarah: Yeah. No, it’s not like we have to, you know, when we’re walking across the Manhattan Bridge, we don’t have to clip in with a carabiner while we’re doing it, right?

Doug: Right. And the thing is, head injuries from falls from walking are far greater than they are from cycling. Now some of that is just we walk more than people ride bikes. But, you know, nobody says you should wear a helmet when you’re walking or taking a shower, right? Like, head injuries from slips and falls in bathrooms are pretty significant.

Doug: One of the reactions online that really got me—I gotta set this up. There was a lot of pancakes-waffles replies to Streetsblog, which I didn’t think were fair. You know, a lot of people were saying just because he’s recommending you wear a helmet or that he’s modeling good behavior doesn’t mean he’s saying I’m not gonna do anything else about bicycle safety. He’s actually doing quite a lot. And that’s also not, I think, what Streetsblog was saying. They’re saying the focus on this can distract from the other things we need to do.

Doug: One writer I love responded, “If only the guy was also supporting bike lanes. Oh wait, this is one of the many stories in which he’s reinstating, creating and supporting bike lanes.” She posted a link to a story and then said, “PS, I wear a helmet.” So it was like, in response to you guys are pancake-waffling this thing, she pancake-waffled it, right?

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: And in fact, in the article, they very clearly said, like, here are the things Mamdani’s doing for bicycle safety.

Sarah: I mean, I think that one of the reasons this is such a triggering issue is that it reveals how much fear we all have about cycling in this country. That we’re terrified of cycling in this country because we know how vulnerable we are and we know how vulnerable our children are. And that if you’ve raised your children like I have to cycle—now my son is a young man who goes out and cycles on his own. And I worry about it. And it’s scary. And we’re scared. And we want to be able to feel better. And how do we feel better is sometimes by putting on a helmet.

Doug: Look, my daughter is 16. All she wanted was a Citi Bike membership so she could get around the city a lot more easily than the subway sometimes. I told her you have to wear a helmet every time you’re on the bicycle. No headphones. At night, you need lights. Bought her a helmet. We are sponsored by, or have been sponsored by a helmet company. And I love their helmets, and I wear it. It’s great.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: But I think the thing is, there is a difference between what you and I tell our children or our friends, like, “Hey, be safe out there,” versus the responsibility a mayor has, right? Like, it’s a very crude analogy that I sometimes will say but, like, if you were on a college campus where there are a lot of sexual assaults, which is a lot of college campuses.

Sarah: Which is any college campus.

Doug: Right. It’s one thing for a woman to say to her fellow—woman to her friend, “Hey, I’m coming with you to that party,” or, “You’re leaving to go to the bathroom? Let me go with you.” “Hey, maybe don’t go out with that guy alone, or, like, text. If I don’t hear from you, I’m gonna go knock on the door.” That’s all reasonable stuff for a friend to say to a friend.

Doug: If, in response to a lot of sexual assaults on campus, the dean of the university said, “Women, don’t go to the bathroom alone. Don’t go to a room with a strange guy you don’t know.” I think we would all say, “Fuck you, man.” Like, you have a responsibility to say to the men who are doing the assaulting, you’re gonna be responsible. And here are the conditions we, the university, are gonna put in place to prevent these things from happening in the first place. Right? Like, I think me saying to my daughter, “Hey, be safe out there,” is different than the mayor saying, “Hey, be safe out there,” to everybody’s kids.

Sarah: Yeah. And also, I mean, it’s just an indicator that we don’t believe that we can create an environment that’s safe, right?

Doug: That ultimately it all comes down to us.

Sarah: Yeah. And so it’s like, well, this is a society where actually people’s lives are not worth very much. And we’re told that by the environment we move around in every day. So I had better do the little things that I can.

Doug: Suit up for war.

Sarah: To try to protect myself. And it becomes almost like a talisman or a symbol of I am trying to protect myself. I am—I’m doing what I can. And I think we all feel, especially at this moment in history, so overwhelmed by the lack of control that we have over our environment—political and physical—that we’re grasping at those things that we can do to protect ourselves. And the anxiety also makes us angry, and it’s easy to let that anger come out when we feel like other people aren’t sort of validating our little things that we’re doing to try to protect ourselves.

Doug: Yeah. And I think from the advocacy side, the touchiness also comes from the bad faith elected officials who use, like I said, any helmet messaging, any cycling safety campaign, a spate of cycling deaths even, to propose things like mandatory helmet laws. It is a slippery slope from a good-intentioned mayor saying, “Hey, I think it’s a good idea to wear a helmet,” to—if you know who this is in New York—Bob Holden or Vicki Palladino or Doug Ford, let’s say.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Doug: Just saying mandatory helmet laws for everyone. On that note, I do want to just again say the messenger matters.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: If Mamdani weren’t also doing all of these other great things, you know, dusting off old plans that had been canceled, creating new bike lanes, doing all kinds of stuff to encourage safe cycling in the city from an institutional level, I think we’d be having a very different conversation.

Sarah: Well, we would, because, you know, we’ve had mayors who put on the helmet.

Doug: Eric Adams, on his second day in office as mayor after he was elected, in fact, I think the day after he was elected, he rode to a press conference. But the second day he was in office, he rode to work. He wore a suit and he wore a helmet. He frequently rode around on a Citi Bike or his own bike, and he’d have his, like, I am the New York City mayor jacket on or whatever, and he’d wear a helmet.

Sarah: Yep.

Doug: A lot of good that did us when his top aide was indicted for taking bribes for canceling a bike lane project in Brooklyn, right?

Sarah: Right.

Doug: Bill de Blasio, who to his credit helped push Vision Zero forward, got us the bike lane on the Brooklyn Bridge, did some other good stuff, but also slow-rolled a lot of stuff and had a very car-first mentality.

Sarah: And fast-rolled his way through stop signs and …

Doug: Right, and drove to the gym every day. I could only find two times that he rode a bike, and he wore a helmet both times. One, he was promoting the introduction of pedal-assist Citi Bikes in 2018.

Sarah: Uh-huh.

Doug: Another time in 2021, he rode to City Hall to celebrate Bike Month. He wore a helmet both times. At the same time, in 2019, there were 15 cycling deaths in the first six months of the year, and we, the advocates, had to stage a die-in in Washington Square Park to get him to commit, to shame him into committing more money to building out more bike lanes. So the fact that he wore a helmet and didn’t even say, “Hey look, I’m wearing a helmet,” didn’t really matter much in terms of cycling safety at the institutional level. Then there’s Mike Bloomberg.

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Doug: Our greatest mayor for cycling until now, until Mamdani.

Sarah: For sure.

Doug: He didn’t even ride a bike!

Sarah: Nope.

Doug: I couldn’t even find a picture of him riding a bike. The only picture I have of him near a bicycle is at the launch of the Citi Bike program in 2013, where he’s standing next to one of the blue bikes with Janette and others. I was at the press conference. But he never rode. And in fact, this became such an issue for him that the Post and others accused him of being a typical “limousine liberal.” And one of his spokespeople had to issue a statement saying, well, actually, he does know how to ride a bike. He just can’t remember the last time he did. But again, didn’t even ride a bike, much less wear a helmet, and did more for cycling than any mayor in our history up to that point. So the wearing of the helmet does and doesn’t matter, and the messenger matters more.

Sarah: Yeah. I mean, I think that in the Mamdani case, what makes a difference in terms of him being the messenger is he has come into public life and rocketed to the position that he’s in right now as this beloved mayor because he’s relatable, right?

Doug: Yes.

Sarah: Because he’s not a billionaire who lives on the Upper East Side in a limestone mansion.

Doug: He’s not telling you to take the free bus. He wants to ride the free bus.

Sarah: Exactly. So I think that that’s a really crucial difference, and that’s why I do like to see him modeling the behavior that I would like my son—and myself, probably—to engage in. And I just—I didn’t get as mad about all of this as everybody else because I’m like, yes, he’s doing something that’s imperfect. And then Streetsblog is pushing back on it. Good.

Doug: They’re doing their job, yeah.

Sarah: You know, like, that’s the debate that we should be having. This is the discourse that we should be having. And yeah, it’s just disappointing that we get stuck there and then it doesn’t go forward.

Doug: Right. Yeah. And I just want to remind everybody, all he said in the video was “Safety first. See you out there.” It was sort of a Rorschach test of people’s reactions to the helmet discussion. Like I said, you just say the word “helmet,” and suddenly people have all manner of opinions on quote-unquote “both sides.”

Sarah: Yeah. And I mean, unfortunately, the reality is that despite Mamdani’s very strong actions in the first few months of his administration to make our streets safer, there have been a series of really tragic crashes involving cyclists where a helmet didn’t make a difference or wouldn’t have made a difference. And that’s really important to note because it’s like, if we just are like, oh, well, now we’re all gonna wear our helmets and be safe, that’s not how it works. We’ve had so many hit-and-runs happen, Doug. I mean, it’s been really kind of upsetting in the last few months here in New York.

Doug: I was gonna point out, you kind of got ahead of me. I don’t even know if you were looking at the outline, but that’s great. Like, I’m glad we’re on the same page about this. The video was posted the same day or the day after two cyclists were killed by drivers in separate hit-and-runs. One of them was a 29-year-old woman. She was struck from behind by a pickup truck driver who fled the scene. He ran her over and then drove off. And it was really early in the morning, I think 5:10 in the morning. Her boss said she always wore a helmet, but she was stopped according to the reports.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Doug: A helmet in that situation, a Ford pickup truck, not gonna do much for you. You know, my feeling on the video, again, it’s like, yes the messenger matters, but I also think that in a city where you have an average of one person being killed, a pedestrian or a cyclist, let’s say every three to four days, there’s probably never gonna be a good time to post a “Hey, folks, be safe out there” video.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: And in a country where you have, like, what, you know, a hundred people a day dying, a PSA campaign that says, “Hey, it’s on you to wear a helmet,” or anything that gives that impression, there’s never good timing for that. You know, it’s sort of like Republicans and “Oh, now’s not the time to talk about gun control.” It’s like the inverse of that. And we do need to talk seriously about what’s going on here.

Sarah: This is the thing about Vision Zero that gets lost a lot in the translation to the American context from where it was originated in Sweden. There, it really always, always was focused on the environment, the design and modifying behavior through engineering and automated enforcement—speed cameras—and a lot of other systemic solutions. It just—it never, ever was about that.

Doug: Yeah, the way Vision Zero was explained to me by a Swede who was involved in it was that you take the three E’s as we’re used to here—education, engineering, enforcement—that are used in various orders usually, typically enforcement, education, then a distant third, engineering. And it’s not that you scrap them entirely, but you change them. So she said basically, picture someone screaming at the top of their lungs in all caps, right? Engineering. It’s designing the system so that people, when they fail, they make a mistake, someone else does, nobody dies. It’s automated enforcement, as you just said, usually red light cameras, speed cameras, things like that. It’s not that there’s no room for in-person enforcement for things like intoxicated drivers, drunk driving, et cetera, but it’s mostly automated enforcement.

Doug: And then education is like a whisper. And the whisper is not, “Hey, do better out there.” It’s education about the things that are going into Vision Zero. So “Hey, everybody, the speed limit is going from 35 miles an hour to 20. Here’s why. Here’s when it goes into effect. Here’s how you need to change your behavior.” Or, “Hey, everybody. There are now speed cameras everywhere. Here’s what you need to know.” Not, “Hey, everybody, wear a reflective vest” or “Look both ways before you cross the street.”

Sarah: Carry a flag when you cross the street.

Doug: Right. It’s not behavior-based.

Sarah: I mean, like, I look at my dad who lived in Geneva for a while, and enforcement is education, because he got a speeding ticket almost immediately upon moving there. And then he never got one again. And that’s what we see a lot with speed camera enforcement in this city is that the vast majority of drivers …

Doug: You’re not just far ahead in the outline, you’re far ahead in our production schedule because we still have to do a speed camera versus Flock camera episode. And that’s for a different discussion.

Sarah: Yes, everybody should be aware that yes, we are aware of the speed camera, Flock camera thing, and we are on it.

Doug: We’re working on it. And in fact, that’s why the Vision Zero branding on DOT helmets drives me crazy, because when they launched that program back in the de Blasio administration, that was launched with the DOT commissioner, Polly Trottenberg, and Ydanis Rodriguez, who was in the city council at that point, doing a big press conference where they were being fitted for helmets literally the same week as a bunch of cyclists were killed. And it gave the impression that the response to these deaths, one of which involved a truck driver who was not on a truck route who ran over someone in my neighborhood, another involved, like, a very athletic, fit person who certainly knew how to ride getting run over by a driver who I think, like, crossed over multiple lanes of traffic to make a last-minute left turn. It gave the impression that these things are linked, that, like, we had a bunch of cycling deaths, and so the response is wear a helmet, and we’re gonna provide you with free helmets. Again, don’t have a problem with the free helmet program. It’s just, again, the Vision Zero branding, et cetera.

Doug: Okay, before we go much further, let’s take a break, and then we’re gonna get into some of the facts surrounding helmets.

Doug: Hey everybody, Sarah and I are really happy to welcome Bunch Bike as a new sponsor of The War on Cars. Now I don’t know if you’ve seen a Bunch Bike in the wild, but if you’ve ever been to a bike-friendly country, you’ll find this kind of bike everywhere. It’s electric, it has three wheels, and there’s a big box in the front for kids, for pets or whatever you need to carry. My son and I got to try one out for about a week, and it was seriously amazing. So stable, so smooth, and I just loved riding it. We could talk to each other, we could see each other while we were riding around, and anything we could think of, we just tossed in the bike and we were on our way. Whether you’ve got four kids, six kids, other adults, dogs, groceries, even your kids’ bikes. You just toss them in the front and there you go.

Doug: The Bunch Bike is truly the car killer, something we appreciate here at The War on Cars. It can do anything the family minivan or SUV can do without the hassle of dealing with traffic or having to fill her up. And yeah, I mentioned how easy it is to ride. If you’re a beginner or a little nervous about making the switch away from driving, or maybe you don’t want to have to balance wiggly kids when you’re stopped at an intersection, the Bunch Bike is for you.

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Doug: Okay, so we are 17 hours into recording this episode, and we haven’t yet really talked about the facts around bicycle helmets. And I think we should just lay out here that again, we’re not saying don’t wear a helmet. Helmets can and do protect you in low-stakes, slow-speed crashes. You are getting on your bicycle or off of your bicycle, you stop at an intersection and don’t put your foot down the right way, and you fall over. Yeah, it’s gonna protect you. You hit a pothole. Like I said, a dog runs out in your path, you hit a jogger, another cyclist, a collision with another person on a bike. Those are all situations in which a helmet is gonna help you.

Doug: Where we are going to get into things is like getting hit by a Ford F-150 at 45, 50, 60 miles an hour, chances are might make a difference, but probably not gonna help you all that much. In Jessie’s book, There Are No Accidents, she describes bicycle helmets as basic, low-cost shock absorbers, which I think is a really great way to visualize what a helmet is and what it’s designed for. So first, we should just say that not all helmets are created equally.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Doug: On the one hand, a $40 helmet is gonna protect you as much as a $100 or $200 helmet. And at that point, you’re really just talking about aesthetics, airflow, aerodynamics if you’re super hardcore.

Sarah: Weight.

Doug: Weight, if that’s important to you. But generally, an off-the-shelf helmet from your bike shop at $20, $30, $40, as long as it meets certain certification standards, is gonna protect you. And once the price goes up, there’s no difference. Who sets the standards for bike helmets? Well, the Consumer Product Safety Commission does in the United States.

Sarah: Do we still have one of those?

Doug: Right.

Sarah: [laughs]

Doug: For now. They’re pretty active on social media.

Sarah: Yes, they are.

Doug: So I’m hoping we still—they still actually do the work that they’re supposed to be doing. The CPSC standard, it’s a legal requirement for any helmet manufactured for sale in the United States. It was adopted by the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission, and it’s mandatory for all helmets manufactured for sale, like I said, in the US market. It was based on two sets of standards, the ASTM and the Snell standards, which I’ll get to. And it requires a test where they drop the helmet from about two meters.

Sarah: Okay.

Doug: About six-and-a-half feet. It’s what’s called the “flat anvil test.” And that’s sort of a misnomer because sometimes the anvil is rounded, or it’s got a sharp edge to simulate a curb. Like, to simulate different road conditions, the anvil can be shaped in different ways. But it’s basically called the flat anvil test. And what happens is the helmet is basically secured to some sort of metal, like, head form. Basically something approximating the weight and size of, let’s say, an adult skull and head.

Sarah: Okay.

Doug: Or a kid’s head.

Sarah: Okay.

Doug: Et cetera. And inside that, there is a triaxial accelerometer that measures the force data.

Sarah: Okay.

Doug: It’s dropped onto this flat anvil, usually again, about one to two meters. And then they measure the data from the accelerometer that sees, like, how much of the force of the crash is absorbed by the helmet. And basically what a helmet is designed to do is to transfer the force of the impact away from your head to the Styrofoam, to the plastic, to the various components of the helmet so that your brain doesn’t become the thing that absorbs all that energy and gets injured.

Sarah: Okay. Makes sense.

Doug: Right. Makes total sense. Do you see any issues with this test?

Sarah: You know, I mean, it seems pretty reasonable on its face.

Doug: Yes. It’s a pretty good test. It works. Like, for those …

Sarah: I was imagining them putting a cantaloupe or something inside the helmet and seeing what happened to that.

Doug: Dropping off the roof of the Ed Sullivan Theater. Yeah, right. Yeah, that’s sort of the image I think a lot of us have in our heads, and I’m sure that those videos exist online. However, here is my issue with this.

Sarah: Okay.

Doug: And I am not good at math. I did my best here. I did look up a lot. I did a lot of research for this one. When you are dropping a helmet with that kind of equipment and weight in it from a height of about 6.5 feet, the speed at which the helmet falls and finally hits the anvil is equivalent to about 13 miles per hour. To get to about 30 miles an hour, you’d start to have to go to a five, six or seven-story building. Above that, you’d have to get to, let’s say, a 10-story building to approximate the speed at which that helmet is hitting the ground in a much harder or more forceful crash.

Doug: And that’s just one angle. Now, when they do these tests, right, they’re throwing it at different angles. They’re measuring it from all sides. There’s all sorts of other standards. And I should say to the bicycle helmet manufacturers out there, they often will say our helmets meet and exceed the standards set by the Consumer Product Safety Commission and other independent bodies. So your helmet probably can do you a bit more than 13 miles an hour, but there’s a lot more that goes on in a crash than just, like, a linear vertical or horizontal drop. There’s the angle at which you’re hitting the ground, there’s the size of the object that hits you. Where does the rest of your body fall?

Sarah: I was gonna say, like, the impact is not only affecting your head, it’s affecting your spine, for one thing, and your internal organs. I mean …

Doug: And we’re gonna get to sort of the cervical and spinal stuff with helmets, too.

Sarah: Okay.

Doug: I mentioned the ASTM and the Snell standards.

Sarah: Right.

Doug: So ASTM is the American Society for Testing and Materials. It’s a standard-setting organization. Sometimes you’ll see an ASTM sticker on a helmet. Some are certified by the Safety Equipment Institute, which is also an independent nonprofit. Some are certified just by the manufacturer, so you have to be careful. So you really have to read the labels. And again, to meet an ASTM certification, a bicycle helmet also has to perform about a two-meter drop.

Sarah: Okay.

Doug: There are other tests too. Have you heard of the Snell Foundation?

Sarah: No, I haven’t.

Doug: Snell, it’s a nonprofit. It’s dedicated to all of this research about helmet safety standards. And I didn’t realize that Snell—I mean, I assumed it was like a name of someone, but I assumed it was like the scientist who came up with the standard. William “Pete” Snell, he was an amateur sports car driver.

Sarah: Oh. No.

Doug: In 1956, he died of a head injury when the auto racing helmet he had didn’t protect his head during a crash.

Sarah: Hmm.

Doug: And so since then, this foundation has been set up. It’s a nonprofit to certify all of these different kinds of helmets. They are said to have had the toughest standards for helmets over many years. Then you have European standards. There’s the EN 1078. That’s the official European safety standard for helmets worn by pedal cyclists, skateboarders and roller skaters.

Sarah: Okay.

Doug: Their test covers things like field of vision, like where does the helmet fit on your head? Can you see? The area of coverage, right? Because a helmet that only covers part of your head is not gonna be as effective as one that covers all of it. There’s full-face coverings for BMX cyclists, for example. They also measure the shock-absorbing capacity of the helmet. They drop it at a speed of about 5.42 meters per second, which is about 17 feet per second, also onto a solid metal anvil. They also do the accelerometer test in that test. They also test helmets in three conditions: high temperature, low temperature and after UV aging, because Styrofoam degrades.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: Plastic fails. And we’re gonna get to when to replace a helmet. Then e-bike standards.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: Helmets for e-bikes are different than helmets for pedal cycles, for regular traditional, let’s say, acoustic bicycles. There’s the NTA 8776 standard.

Sarah: Okay.

Doug: And many of the helmet companies like Bern, companies like Upway, which have sponsored the podcast, will put, like, when you buy an e-bike, you need to actually get the specific e-bike helmet. Why? Obviously, you go faster on an e-bike. And if you were to fall at a higher speed, the forces on your head are different than traditional regular bicycle speed.

Sarah: I hate to throw this in because it’s complicated enough already, but e-scooters also.

Doug: Yeah, I didn’t even get into e-scooters.

Sarah: We’re not gonna get into it.

Doug: It’s a whole separate thing. But those, you’ll see people wearing the full-face BMX-style mask, right?

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: And helmets. And, you know, e-bikes can go 25, 28, higher, depending on the class and depending on whether they’re even legal or not. So obviously, the impact forces from a crash at those speeds are greater than if you’re going 10 or 12 miles an hour. And since standard bike helmets are only tested for these slower speeds, you need something stronger and differently designed if you’re riding an e-bike. This is where the NTA 8776 standard that I just mentioned comes into play. So they’re tested for higher speeds, heavier weight, greater impact energy. They are designed to absorb strong impacts. They protect a larger portion of your head. And they’re just—they’re better.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: Do you see any problems here?

Sarah: Well, the standards are confusing, and there’s so many different kinds. And also, None of these seem to address what happens if you get hit by a vehicle traveling at a high rate of speed.

Doug: Yes. I mean, I think that’s 100 percent right. Focusing just on the more traditional crashes that these are designed for—I’ll use myself as an example. I have a couple of e-bikes. I never knew I needed a separate helmet just for the e-bike. I just got the e-bikes.

Sarah: Nobody told you that.

Doug: Nobody told me that. And I just used the helmet I had been using for all of my other bicycle riding. And I’m a pretty well-educated, knowledgeable person who does this work. And I mean, logically, yeah, of course it makes sense—faster speeds, greater forces. I should probably rethink my helmet. But you think e-bike, it’s got the word “bike” in it. Bike helmet, done.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: And I wonder, even in bike shops, when they encourage you, let’s say, to get a helmet, I would imagine that not every bicycle shop is selling you the proper helmet you need for an e-bike.

Sarah: Yeah, I just learned this in the last minute. I had no idea that this was the case.

Doug: I think the other thing to say here is, like, I’m confused just listening to myself.

Sarah: [laughs] Yeah.

Doug: How is a regular consumer supposed to know what to do?

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: You know, I use Citi Bike. Am I really gonna carry a separate e-bike helmet when I want to ride an e-bike? Now of course, you could just carry an e-bike helmet and use it for everything, because higher standards are gonna help you even on a regular bike. But once we’re getting into that nitpickiness level of, like, know what the standards are, know what the stickers mean, know what type of helmet you need to use, have the right helmet for the type of riding you’re doing. And we’re individualizing the problem.

Sarah: Yeah. Okay.

Doug: When to replace helmets. This is a big issue, right?

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: Styrofoam degrades. There are different conditions: humidity, dryness, exposure to sunlight, things like that. You are supposed to replace your helmets every now and then. There’s no set standard for when a helmet should be replaced. The Consumer Product Safety Commission recommends every five to ten years. Snell, when they were doing bicycle helmet certifications, they recommended every three to five years.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: Consumer Reports kind of split the difference, and they say every five years.

Sarah: Hmm.

Doug: This is from an article from 2024, Consumer Reports, A story by Kevin Loria, who’s the senior health and food reporter. Sarah, why don’t you read this?

Sarah: “CR recommends following manufacturer recommendations, or getting a new bicycle helmet every five years or so because of the ways a helmet can get beaten up over time. A heavily-used helmet is going to be exposed to ultraviolet light from the sun, and it might be repeatedly tossed into a locker or a car where summer temperatures can top 120 degrees Fahrenheit. A beaten-up, worn-out helmet will protect you better than not wearing one, but eventually you’ll want to replace it. Depending on where and how it’s used, a helmet will be exposed to different levels of wear and tear, as well as specific environmental conditions—heat and humidity. ‘These collectively may alter impact performance,’ says Barry Miller, PhD, Director of Outreach and Business Development for the Virginia Tech Helmet Lab. The lab tests helmets for a variety of sports, and conducts research into how helmets can reduce risks of brain injury.”

Doug: So lots of different conditions that can change how your helmet performs over time, how the Styrofoam degrades and dries out. You have to replace it. The other issue becomes helmets are a one-and-done deal. You get into a crash. Even if you don’t see visible signs of damage on the helmet, if the helmet was impacted, you need to replace it, because there could be a big crack inside there that will cause the helmet to not perform to standards and fail the next time you’re in a crash. You drop the helmet, the Styrofoam can crack. You probably should think about replacing it depending on what you think the severity of that drop was.

Sarah: Right.

Doug: A brand new helmet you never touched might be fine after five years. But it really depends. Do you live in Arizona or do you live in Maine?

Sarah: Right.

Doug: Like, a whole bunch of things can play into when and how often you need to replace your helmet. I think we should talk very quickly about MIPS.

Sarah: Okay>

Doug: You will often see a little yellow, usually sticker that says “MIPS” on a helmet. That stands for Multi-Directional Impact System.

Sarah: Okay.

Doug: And that—I’m getting this from a Popular Mechanics article. We’ll put links in all the show notes. That’s a slip plane layer that moves just millimeters against the direction the head rotates as the cyclist falls. And it rotates during and after impact. According to this Popular Mechanics story, it says “The motion mimics the movement of the brain’s cerebrospinal fluid.” So as the brain twists inside your skull during an angled and continuous impact, like sliding, let’s say, you know, over the pavement and, you know, maybe as you’re falling, the liner redirects those forces around your head, basically keeps the movement so that the brain is not absorbing the majority of that impact. And it says the less your brain gets jostled around, the better.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: Nobody disagrees. So there’s the MIPS standard. So you really should look to see if your helmet has a MIPS standard. Again, we’re putting a lot of pressure and a lot of responsibility on the individual consumer who’s just gone to Target to buy a bike for his kid, who’s just gone to the bike store because they want to start riding to work. And maybe they’ve got a knowledgeable salesperson, maybe they don’t. But, like, that’s a lot of work to do. All the helmets I’ve ever used, the helmets we’ve advertised on the show, meet and exceed these standards.

Sarah: Yeah. Yeah.

Doug: This is also one reason why helmets have that outer smooth plastic shell. Sometimes you’ll see people wearing an old helmet where the plastic has flaked off or chipped off.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: And they’ve just got the Styrofoam.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: No, you should replace that. Part of what you want to have happen if you hit the asphalt is you don’t want your head to suddenly get snagged on rough asphalt and rough Styrofoam meeting each other. You want the smooth sliding so that the forces dissipate and your brain doesn’t come to, like, a hard, complete stop.

Sarah: You’re freaking me out, Doug. I gotta say that a lot of this stuff about helmets, it just—it’s scary. I think that that’s part of what is going on with our psychological reaction to helmets is that helmets themselves are a reminder. It’s an activity that we’re doing, and we’re under threat while we’re doing it.

Doug: Yes. And that there’s so much to know, and that it can be overwhelming. Like, if I were a new cyclist, and I was the kind of person—and I am sort of this kind of person—who likes to google as much information as I can. And sometimes, you know, when I first started riding—I’m much different now, like, get the right gear—I would be overwhelmed. You know, I would just—it would be like walking into the world’s biggest store with endless aisles. I’d be like, I don’t even know where to start. And I might just walk right out. And so then I might never ride a bike.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: That would be bad.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: So we have been talking about the scientific and government testing and standards, but then there’s just the reality of how people use helmets and their effectiveness on the road. Our buddy Ian Walker, he did a study where he wore a helmet and wore traditional cycling gear, and then he also wore regular clothing and wore a wig.

Sarah: Yep.

Doug: And measured how much space drivers gave him. And he found in his study that he got much more closely passed when he was wearing a helmet than when he was wearing regular clothing or the wig.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: With apologies to Ian, there are some disputes to this study. He has responded to them. Again, I think just it’s—I’m less getting into the nitpickiness of these studies and more of just like, it’s a confusing subject.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: There is some evidence that cyclists who wear helmets take more risks. That—again, anecdotally, when I don’t wear a helmet, I ride slower than when I do.

Sarah: Oh, yeah, me too. For sure.

Doug: Because I know that the consequences of me riding my bicycle and falling off of it are gonna be different if I’m going 28 miles an hour versus eight miles an hour.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: There’s also the type of bicycle that you’re riding. Why are Dutch cyclists so safe? Not just because of the infrastructure. They are riding upright bicycles. They are going at slower speeds. We have a lot of people in this country, because cycling is still seen as sport in a lot of places, who are riding fast, aggressive posture, bikes where they’re kind of incentivized to go faster, and the consequences of a fall from that position can be a lot different. So there’s that. That all factors into how effective a helmet is gonna be. Are you even wearing it correctly?

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Doug: There are some cycling manufacturers who recommend that if you go to get a helmet, you get fitted for it. How long do you think they recommend that you take to actually get a proper fitting for a helmet?

Sarah: It’s probably about five to ten minutes.

Doug: Yeah, 15 minutes.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: Nobody’s doing that.

Sarah: No. And then also, I would like to point out that, fine, fit it until you’re blue in the face, but we’ve all had helmets where the straps, as you sweat on them and clip it and reclip it and whatever, you know, it changes. And then are you gonna get it back exactly in the right position or not?

Doug: Every time you wear it too, right?

Sarah: Yeah. I mean …

Doug: Every time you put it on your head are you really—like, you know, and people do, right? Is it covering your head the right way? You see a lot of people wearing the helmet backwards or tilted so far back on their forehead.

Sarah: Or without fastening the chinstrap. I would just like to say that I often have seen NYPD bike cops who either have the helmet attached to their bicycle instead of to their head, or they have the chinstrap unfastened because I guess it’s tougher. It’s like it shows weakness to, like, use the chin strap. [laughs]

Doug: Look, if they see someone shoplifting at Walgreens, they gotta pop that thing off and run right in.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: You know, I think the big thing here is I didn’t even want to get too deep into the studies because here’s the thing with the studies—and we’ll put links to everything that I’ve done in terms of research into the show notes. For every study showing one thing, you’ll find others saying something different, and then you’ll find responses to that. And I don’t want this to sound like Make America Healthy Again, like the science on vaccines.

Sarah: Do your own research.

Doug: There’s mercury in the vaccines. Do your own research. That’s not it. It’s that the science can be confusing to the ordinary person. My larger point is not do or don’t trust the science. I do trust the science that says a helmet is gonna help you in these situations. What I don’t trust is a strategy that says you have to do the right thing 100 percent of the time every time in order to stay safe, because that’s not a strategy.

Sarah: You know, this is, again, coming back to seeing traffic violence as a public health issue, and developing responses that are meaningful—public health responses, which are systemic responses. I mean, that’s what it just keeps coming back to. And, you know, as far as helmet use in New York City, you and I know, and anyone who’s been in New York recently knows, Citi Bike is a huge form of transportation here now. Everybody uses it. It’s vital to our transportation system and how people get around. And most people do not wear helmets when they’re riding a Citi Bike.

Doug: And we’ll get to this, but what has made those Citi Bikers safer and all of the other cyclists out there, Citi Bike had this real accelerationist effect of making cycling safe, because the safety in numbers effect is real, right? Like, a driver who isn’t used to looking out for cyclists isn’t gonna look out for cyclists. But suddenly, if there are hundreds of cyclists on their commute every day, eventually they realize, I need to look out for cyclists. And you’re just safer.

Doug: I want to get into mandatory helmet laws because I think that was part of the response, as I said, the touchiness of some of the advocates, myself included, was the slippery slope fear. That for now it’s a feel-good video from Mamdani, next week it’s an anti-bike politician saying every Citi Bike rider, every rider in New York City has to wear a helmet.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: Mandatory helmet laws, just really quickly, there’s a lot of problems. Number one, they lead to fewer people riding bicycles. That intuitively makes sense because, like, if you forgot your helmet, you don’t have one. Oh shoot, my helmet’s old and broken. I can’t ride today. That depresses the safety in numbers effect that I just talked about, which doesn’t then necessarily reduce head injuries.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Doug: And basically, if you want safer cycling, you need more cyclists. So we do have real-world experiments with mandatory helmet laws. Australia had a mandatory helmet law that was introduced in the early ’90s. And after 1992, Melbourne researchers observed that 43 percent of teenagers, 9 percent of kids and 21 percent of all cyclists stopped cycling because of mandatory helmet laws.

Sarah: Wow!

Doug: Now sometimes you actually will see improvements in safety following the passage of a mandatory helmet law. Like, head injuries might go down, other serious injuries might go down, and people attribute that to the mandatory helmet law. Correlation is not causation, and this is from a piece by Sophia Wang, who’s a researcher at UCLA writing for the Urban Cycling Institute in Amsterdam. She writes, “Oftentimes, the passage of helmet laws coincide with more attention to creating a bike-friendly environment. Concurrent changes such as developing separate bike lanes, better infrastructure such as widening bike lanes, clearly marking bike boxes or other forms of traffic calming also minimize the risk of head injuries.”

Doug: A lot of times what happens is there’s a spate of cycling crashes, and so people will respond with mandatory helmet laws, but they will also respond with more bike infrastructure. Which is causing the injuries to go down? You can’t necessarily say. It’s probably a little bit of both, but then the depressive factors of lower cycling rates might be offset by better cycling infrastructure.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Doug: So we don’t really know. Other problems with mandatory helmet laws, they are bike share system killers.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: Speaking of Australia, they had these mandatory helmet laws, and in Melbourne and Sydney and elsewhere, their bike share systems failed. Here in the United States, Citi Bike, Lyft has opposed helmet laws because of that reason. Like, it destroys the advantage of Citi Bike, like we said, which is you just decide you want to ride a bike, you don’t happen to have a helmet, and you’re going crosstown. Big deal.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: There’s also the issue of inequitable enforcement. Even without mandatory helmet laws, there is inequitable enforcement of helmet use. Mandatory helmet laws make that worse. There was a Seattle study that showed that 60 percent of helmet citations went to unhoused people.

Sarah: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And, like, let’s just say that in the 2026 environment in the United States …

Doug: Yeah, we don’t need to give more excuses to law enforcement to pull people over.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: Obviously, Black people are pulled over at higher rates than white cyclists. A study of helmet citations in Seattle found that Black people on bikes were summonsed four times as often, and Indigenous people twice as often as white people.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: So there is the pie-in-the-sky idea of what a helmet law or helmet use can do, and then there’s how it meets reality.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: In Tampa, as many as 80 percent of cyclists stopped for cycling summonses were Black, even though Tampa is only about a quarter Black—this is all from Jessie’s book. And you’ll find examples in city after city. Even here in New York, where helmets are not required for adults, you still see people pulled over and the cops writing tickets for it.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: Then there’s the larger meta-health conversation: the relative health benefits of riding a bike over not riding at all. So yes, wearing a helmet is gonna protect you from a head injury, but riding a bicycle leads to lower mortality than sedentary lifestyles. Lots of studies—I found this sort of, like, study of studies that basically said, like, you know, regular exercise such as cycling is beneficial to health, and helmet laws are counterproductive when they discourage cycling and encourage sedentary forms of transportation such as driving. And actually found that even unhelmeted cyclists have longer lifespans than sedentary people.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: I don’t want to say that, like, one study is all it, but, like, this is complicated. Then there’s the big one. You mentioned your Dutch friend.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: People say, well, we’re not at Amsterdam levels of safety yet, and the only reason they’re riding without helmets there is because it’s so safe. So for now, wear a helmet. I don’t disagree. Wear a helmet here in New York. We are not at Amsterdam levels of safety. But I think we’ve all seen those charts where it basically shows, like, the amount of cycling miles ridden per capita and the number of deaths, and how that switches when you get to the United States end of the chart. We have the fewest bicycle miles ridden of most industrialized nations and the most per capita deaths.

Sarah: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Doug: Clearly something needs to be done that’s not everybody wear a helmet. This is a story from Cycling Industry News, and they are quoting Eric Richter, who’s the senior brand development manager at Giro, the big helmet manufacturer. He says, “We do not design helmets specifically to reduce chances or severity of injury when impacts involve a car. The number of variables is too great to calculate. The speed of the car, the mass, the angle of the impact—” you know, all the stuff we were talking about earlier— “the rider, the surface, the speed of the rider. Did the driver or the rider swerve a little or hit the brakes before impact? All of these variables and more are unique in every instance. And there’s no way to accurately predict what is gonna happen or the forces involved.”

Sarah: Yeah. And let’s not forget that there’s also other vehicles involved. Often when a cyclist is knocked off of their bicycle by one vehicle, they then get hit again by another vehicle, sometimes run over, which obviously a helmet is not gonna protect you from that. And so it seems to me like wearing a helmet protects you from a narrow but important set of circumstances that I would like to protect myself from.

Doug: Yes.

Sarah: And so that’s why I wear a helmet. But I don’t expect that wearing a helmet is gonna make riding a bicycle a safe activity in the environment that I encounter in most American cities.

Doug: Yeah. And I think we understand the hierarchy of controls, that inverted pyramid that made the rounds during COVID, but is certainly something you’d see on a factory floor, right? What’s the number one thing at the top of that inverted pyramid? It’s eliminate the hazard.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: The safest crash is the one you don’t get into.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: Right? That’s the easiest one to survive. And again, the message, like you have been saying, that it sends to people is like, oh, I might get hit and killed, and that’s why I need to wear a helmet? Fuck that. I’m not—I’m gonna just drive.

Sarah: Yeah. Yeah.

Doug: There was someone who posted on social media after the Mamdani video came out and the Streetsblog piece, the Norman Rockwell freedom of speech meme with the guy standing up in the meeting. And she just posted, “You should wear a bicycle helmet.” And what I want to ask this person—who’s very smart—who do you mean by “you?” Because me with my bald head, yes, I can very easily wear a bicycle helmet.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Doug: A Black woman, a person with an afro, a person with a religious head covering, who you do see riding around places like Brooklyn and other cities. So again, like, a helmet that’s sitting on top of a religious head covering or a lot of hair is not gonna do your forehead any good.

Sarah: Yeah. Yeah.

Doug: So I really wanna ask people when you say everybody should wear a bicycle helmet, who do you mean by “everybody?” Who do you mean by “you?” And that’s a question I think that you need to answer before you push these things as, like, the be-all end-all of cycling safety. Again, I wear a helmet. I think it’s important. We have to keep saying that.

Sarah: You do realize that no matter how much you qualify what you say, you’re still gonna—like, this episode is gonna get so many people angry.

Doug: This episode hasn’t been released yet, and our inbox is already filling up with emails.

Sarah: [laughs]

Doug: Right. Okay. So as we’re sort of trying to land this plane, I think there’s another thing here. This is more directed at the progressives and the liberals, because I think sometimes the conservatives are a lost cause, but we have to speak to them too sometimes. Why did you all freak out so much over this? I didn’t think the Streetsblog story was all that bad. You know, again, I get how social media works, and, like, it did perhaps seem like they were saying one thing at the expense of the other, and the pancakes-waffles and all that. But there’s just something about this conversation that causes people who, like we said, understand holistic solutions and institutional solutions to public health crises and other problems, it all goes out the door when the subject of bicycle safety comes into play. And not in the way that I think you and I and a lot of our listeners are of, like, look, yes, I do wear one, but I’m working towards a society where it’s not necessary, but just as a sort of like, no, wear a helmet. Stop. Full stop. End of conversation. It’s like, no, that’s probably actually the beginning of the conversation, not the end. So I don’t know. Do you have any theories? Why do people lose their minds about this?

Sarah: I really do think it’s fear. I think it’s because it forces us to confront just how scary it is out there. And that, you know, for me, like, I like riding a bicycle without a helmet. Like, I like the feeling of riding a bicycle without a helmet.

Doug: The same.

Sarah: And yet I know that even if I’m riding at a low speed and being really careful, because of traffic violence, I’m at risk for, you know, severe injury when I do that. And I don’t want to be reminded of that. And I think that liberals can feel like it’s being responsible to show that we are scared and to say, like, yeah, you need to be scared. And it’s this sense that when you’re on a bicycle, you’re doing something where you have to prove your virtue, you have to prove that you’re doing it right.

Doug: You’re always an ambassador for the cause. You’re never just a person who needs to get groceries.

Sarah: Exactly. And you have to be doing it right all the time. And if you mess up and you don’t do it right—I mean, as a woman, I think this is, you know, it’s very much the she was wearing a short skirt. You know, what do you expect? This is just the way males behave. I think it’s very similar. And so women are always like, “Well, no, I was dressed modestly,” or “I was safe. I didn’t get drunk.” I—all of these things that you have to constantly, as a member of an outgroup, be saying, “Look, I’m doing it right.”

Sarah: And I think that that is something that especially people who maybe don’t ride bikes as much might see bikes as being a liberal thing in the culture wars where you have to be proving, no, no, no, we’re doing it completely virtuously. And you’ll never be able to say that we’re doing it wrong, because if you show that weakness, then they’ll be able to come in and kill you.

Doug: The confounding thing is that so much of that is coming from progressives. You know, like, I get the conservatives, the mouth breathers who are like, “Well, she was wearing a short skirt.” You know, like, screw you, buddy. That’s not how it works. Like, that’s not where the responsibility is. But those same people on our side, the progressives, who would never shame a person in that situation, are laying the responsibility on the individual in this one just because a bike helmet and a bicycle are involved. So it’s really confounding, forced as we felt into doing it. Although I think, you know, we’ve been talking about doing it for a long time.

Sarah: Yeah, we wanted to.

Doug: I’m sort of kidding about how we felt that we were forced. But, like, we’ve been wanting to do it, because this is a difficult thing to talk about. And we think the important thing for advocates out there is sometimes maybe it is important to cede some ground and say, like, “Cool, I wear a helmet.” We have to do that qualification thing, but we have to keep the focus on the institutional solutions. And sometimes that’s gonna mean pushing back against people who are otherwise aligned with us.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: I don’t think we’ve solved this.

Sarah: No, we have not solved it.

Doug: I think, like I said, the science and the studies—people are gonna be sending me stuff that disproves some of the stuff I said. I would be able to send you back stuff that disproves what you say, and there we’d be. Again, I really want to emphasize, this isn’t a do-your-own-research thing. This is like, there are actual answers to what keeps people from being hit by cars. And it’s not a bicycle helmet. As you said, it’s not a talisman. It cannot ward off a Ford F-150 where the driver is staring at their phone doing 50 in a school zone.

Sarah: Yeah. Or road cyclists, professional cyclists.

Doug: Wearing the right clothing and helmets.

Sarah: Riding completely legally, having vehicles plow into them at high speed, a helmet is not gonna save you in that situation. And where I feel like ending it is, you know, yes, I wear a helmet. I just bought a new helmet recently because I realized it was time to buy a new helmet. Wear a helmet, but advocate for systemic change to make our streets safer so that if you do get saved by your helmet, it’s because you did do something clumsy and fall over at a low speed and didn’t get your bell rung because you were wearing a helmet, not expecting it to protect you from a massive vehicle going at 50 miles an hour and hitting you from behind.

Doug: One last thing I’ll say is that we are interviewed a lot because of our positions, because of the book. As an advocate, I’m often photographed in stories that run online and in print, or I’m on the TV in a news story. I never wear or bring a helmet to those interviews because I don’t want the focus to be on me identified as a cyclist. I want the focus to be me identified as a person who has been identified as me, a human being who is deserving of safety.

Doug: Now sometimes you’ll get the, “Where’s your helmet?” in response, but I’d rather actually focus on just me in normal clothing. So I’m not playing a character who wears a helmet on your TV show or in your news story. Stay safe out there. Do what you need to do. Fight for change. And we’ll keep working for that.

Sarah: Yeah, and Mayor Mamdani, anytime you want to come on and talk to us about bike helmets or bike lanes or anything else to do with the beautiful streets of this beautiful city, you’re welcome to come on.

Doug: There’s a Citi Bike station just around the corner. Okay, that’s it for this episode of The War on Cars. We will put a long list of links in the show notes. Thanks for joining us on this discussion.

Sarah: Remember, you can support us and get exclusive bonus content, presale access to live show tickets, free stickers and more by signing up on Patreon at Patreon.com/thewaroncarspod.

Doug: A big thanks to everyone who supports The War on Cars, including our top contributors, Charley Gee of Human Powered Law in Portland, Oregon, Mark Hedlund, Virginia Baker, Brandon DeCosta, Dave Shellnutt, who’s the founder of The Biking Lawyer LLP in Toronto, Canada, and our newest top supporter, Amy Morgenstern. Thanks so much, Amy.

Sarah: Pick up a copy of our book, Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile, wherever you get your books. You can also find us out on the road. Learn more at LifeAfterCars.com.

Doug: We also want to thank our sponsors. Listeners of The War on Cars can save 15 percent on the best gear for cycling and walking from Cleverhood now through the end of September with code DRYANDHAPPY. Just go to Cleverhood.com/waroncars. We also want to thank our new sponsor, Bunch Bikes. If you are looking to replace car trips, to take the family to school, to get to work or just do your errands, go to Bunchbike.com/waroncars.

Sarah: The War on Cars is produced with the generous support of the Helen and William Mazer Foundation.

Doug: This episode was recorded at the Brooklyn Podcasting Studio by Justin Fernandez. It was edited by Yesenia Moreno.

Sarah: Our theme music is by Nathaniel Goodyear. Transcripts are by Russell Gragg. Our logo is by Dani Finkel. I’m Sarah Goodyear.

Doug: I’m Doug Gordon, and this is The War on Cars.