There is a terrific blog on Cycle Chic–a street fashion blog of cyclists in Copenhagen. The photographer is gifted and has an inclusive eye for who looks good–not just thin young women in thousand-dollar shoes. These images come from that blog.
I really wish people would wear helmets. I know, I know…but the statistics. I wish designers would get busy designing sleek, affordable, fabulous helmets.
Seeing cyclists without helmets is the surest sign that you have a healthy, thriving bicycle culture. http://www.cyclehelmets.org (The Bicycle Helmet Research Foundation) is the leading scientific site on helmets. Well worth a look.
Thanks, but in reading through that site, it’s isn’t really about bike helmet research, per se. It’s about assuring people that biking is safe because the risk of a head injury is less, even without a helmet, than the risks of obesity, and that argument is based on the debate about whether forcing cyclists to wear helmets reduces their biking and induces them to be more sedentary. This is really a different question than whether helmets reduce the risks of injury during incidental falls (not vehicle crashes.) So the site you link to is an advocacy site that attempts to evaluate of the efficacy of compulsion (a policy intervention), not helmet effectiveness (a human factor intervention). FWIW, I don’t believe in mandating helmets. I do believe in wearing them to protect against incidental falls, just like I don’t understand why we don’t have seat belts on buses you can use to strap down a childseat. Given that the arguments against wearing helmets usually come down to “it messes up my hair” and “I look like a dork in mine” the cost-benefit is apparent to me that I wince a bit every time somebody whizzes by me in downtown LA–hardly what most people would consider a “thriving bike culture” without a helmet, just like I wince when I see people who put their dogs in the back of pickups.