Camera: Fujifilm XT-5 | TTArtisan 35mm lens.
Location: https://w3w.co/pill.tell.damp

Kids on bikes on a school excursion with a couple of teachers cat-herding them into some semblance of an orderly procession.

Good to see them all wearing helmets. The evidence around bike helmets is clear. They protect against the nastiness of head injuries and significantly lower the severity of traumatic brain injury.

However there is also argument for not making the wearing of bike helmets mandatory (as it is in Australia) that goes like this:

studies show that the total number of people regularly riding bikes decreases when mandatory helmet wearing is introduced, so this decrease in the associated health benefits of riding that leads to a NET increased morbidity and mortality rate in the overall population.

Helmet laws = decreased bike use = decreased fitness = higher incidence of things like hypertension, myocardial infarction etc. = more deaths attributed to these illnesses.

Thats the argument.

I was going to write about how when I was a kid I used to have this Speedwell bike with no suspension and drop bars and sketchy brakes and racing thin tyres and magnificent orange paintwork with silver metallic flakes. I loved that bike.

A steed that I rode like an all terrain rodeo cowboy for many years. Without a helmet. Sustaining nothing more severe than a few nasty gravel rash tangles with Newtonian physics.

And I was going to write that over my career as an emergency department nurse I witnessed the deep and sustained trauma that traumatic brain injury (or worse) could inflict on cyclists and their families.

Should you be free to choose to wear a bicycle helmet?