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Amsterdam prepares to ‘ban the fatbikes’ amid rise in serious accidents [The Netherlands]
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2026
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I vaguelly remember a study in Denmark (which has roughly 50/50 of people cycling with and without helmets) that showed that cyclists who wear helmets were more likely to have serious accidents than those who did not, though by a small percentage.
There are several factors that are believed to be behind such an unexpected statistic:
Anyways, the point being that at the kind of speed that people cycle when just commuting in a city bicyle helmets can actually make it slightly more dangerous.
Mind you, this doesn't at all mean that in different situations - such as mountain biking or speed cycling - helmets aren't a must.
In places like The Netherlands pretty much nobody uses a helmet when just cycling in the city.
I would really like to see that study. Because I have studies showing the opposite.
Here is an article (in German, sorry) summarizing and contextualising several studies. One showed that wearing a helmet resulted in car drivers keeping five centimetres less distance when overtaking the cyclist, but that study's method was flawed and a study conducted in Berlin with better equipment and better method (bigger sample size, different routes, women being actually test subjects and not just represented by a guy with a wig, etc) that showed helmet wearing bicyclists being overtaken with more distance.
Here (again German, sorry) is a research report comparing 543 accidents with injured bicyclists in University Hospitals of Munich and Münster and 117 accudent fatality from a database. From the 117 fatalities, 50% died of traumatic brain injury and six wore a helmet. Furthermore, from those injured (not the 117 fatalities) and with traumatic brain injury, none wore helmets.
Here (this time in english) is a meta analysis of studies about the safety of wearing helmets when cycling, concluding the discussed studies show a benefit for safety when wearing a helmet while cycling (too much for.me to summarize).
Sadly I read about this over a decade ago and don't have a link for it anymore.
I looked around and all I could find were studies pointing out that helmets protect against head injury, which was never in dispute and you yourself linked studies for that - my the point was not about helmets reducing head injuries (though the whole rotational vs linear collisions thing means good helmet design is important) but about how as per risk compensation theory if there is an overal increase in risk due to increased perception of safety it might offset the increased in protection from helmets since helmets only protect the head.
Also found lots of things about how mandatory helmet use for cyclists in overall causes more deaths (for example and another example) because it reduces the number of people who take up cycling and the overall negative health outcomes of fewer people cycling add up to to higher mortality that the increased risk of head injury from cycling without a helmet given the low baseline risk of cycling in general.
Here's a pretty good summary from the views in the EU.
Well, first, you did try to make points about brain injuries caused by wearing helmets. Now you claim you never argued about that, so what is it?
Second, it is IMHO not quite intelligent to make an argument about head protection not protectng other body parts. That's like saying a stab protection vest is useless because you can get shot in the head.
Third, the first article I linked talks about a systematic comparative analysis of 23 studies examining risk homeostasis hypothesis, of which 18 could not confirm the hypothesis, three showing inconclusive results and only two being arguments for the hypothesis, the analysis concluding there is little to no evidence for bicycle helmets leading to riskier behavior.
I know the studies about mandatory helmet rules (something I actually never talked about), I find people's behavior in this case utterly incomprehensible and stupid, but again, it's not something I argued for. It just shows me we need to encourage helmet use in different ways. Mandatory for children maybe so that they get used to it, normalizing and encouraging wearing helmets by advertisements etc. IDK, but such efforts can be quite successful if funded and supportes sufficiently.
Ovoid shapes will cause rotational forces on perpendicular impacts, whilst spherical shapes do not. This is just Maths.
Notice how motorcycle helmets are actually spherical.
In my experience the traditional bicycle helmets are half ovoids.
That said I drilled down to the comparative analisys linked from the study you indicated and it basically concludes that people who are more fearful tend to wear helmets when cycling, so the reverse causality relationship of the risk compensation theory (which would be that a person that starts wearing a helmet when cycling becomes more risk taking).
So you make a good point that advising people to wear helmets is not a bad idea.
IMHO, as long as it doesn't turn people away from a more compreensive risk reduction form of cycling (which is how I personally tackled changing from cycling in The Netherlands to cycling in London, which at the time had much worse cycling infrastructure and were motorists weren't used to cyclists when I started doing it - by having quite a lot of tricks to keep me safe from the innatention and error of not just motorists but also pedestrians, most of which were not at all needed in The Netherlands were other road users always expect cyclists to be around), it's fine.
As for mandatory cycling helmets, I'm against it because it severely lowers the uptake of cycling which ultimatelly is worse for people because of worse health outcomes. Also my experience cycling in London during the period were it went from quite atypical to more normalized, is that more cyclists around results in more motorists and pedestrians being naturally aware of and careful towards cyclists (an effect I also noticed from the other side in myself as both a motorist and a pedestrian when I moved from a country with no cycling culture to The Netherlands and got used to lots of cyclists) which in turn makes cycling safer for everybody - in other words, more cycling adoption makes cycling safer. This seems to be aligned with the most common position in The Netherlands as per my last link:
Bruh, it's not that deep. Statistics show that wearing a helmet reduces chances to severe head and brain injuries.
I don't care since I am not discussing helmet mandates.
As for the rest, obviously it's better to prevent accidents in the first place and obviously we need to reduce the number of cars on our streets for multiple reasons. But that's all policy while wearing a helmet is a cheap and easy way to protect yourself against unavoidable accidents and avoidable accidents while waiting and advocating for policy change.
Common bicycle helmet
Common motorcycle helmet
Are you really telling me that in the horizontal axis the first doesn't have a far bigger ratio of major-axis to minor-axis than the second?
Never disputed. After all a hat too will "reduce chances to severe head and brain injuries", though by a tiny amount.
The point was always about how much and if in the typical conditions of city cycling it is enough to offset possible negative effects such as increase risk taking and less careful behavior from drivers around cyclists who are better protected.
It's about aggregated effects rather than this one specific thing you focused on to the exclusion of everything else. If you focus on one thing alone then "always wear a hat when you cycle" would count as a safety recommendation for cyclists.
Mind you from our discussions I did shift my position to think it's a good idea in overall to recommend people to wear a helmet when cycling (mainly because of the study you linked that reviewed various papers and found too little indication of a risk compensation effect), though not on mandatory helmet wearing because there the broader implications - as shown by the experience of Australia - are that all in all it causes more deaths because of the indirect effect of people cycling less hence dying in greater numbers because of the higher mortality for people who don't regularly exercise. There's also the point I quoted from the Dutch that in terms of policy aiming for second prevention (such as cyclist protection equipment) negatively impacts the investment in primary prevention (i.e. a safer cycling environment).
I don't quite understand what you are arguing about. I thought the discussion was about whether wearing a helmet while cycling increases or decreases one's safety and especially one's risk for serious head/brain injuries.
I never made any statements about mandatory helmet rules, effects of helmet shapes etc. I encourage wearing helmets and made some speculations about how an individual's decision to wear a helmet could be encouraged, that's it.
"Helmet shapes that transform linear shocks into rotational shocks are more dangerous" was literally just one thing I threw in as maybe, part, of the cause of those numbers I had read about in Denmark, which was a single line in a much broader discussion.
(I never actually said that it totally offsets other effects, by the way, I just thought it was a contributing factor for the counter-intuitive results I had read in that study)
You just then grabbed that one "maybe this part of it" line of mine and ran with it as if I was claiming that wearing a helmet doesn't reduce the risk of head injuries, something I did not and even though I actually wrote three times (including in the post immediately after your first reply) that wearing a helmet does reduce the risk of head injuries.
As for the rest, as I basically said in the last paragraph of the last post, yeah, based on the recent study you linked that shows there is no clear evidence for a risk compensation effect, so as per all evidence wearing helmet when cycling is safer than not because the helmet does protect the head and if there is no risk compensation effect then there is no indirect increase in risk (due to riskier behaviors) from wearing a helmet. What I remember from what I read as per my original post was a tiny effect (something like 2%) so maybe that was within the error margin. I mean, I'm pretty sure I read about it over a decade ago and you linked to a study which is more recent than that.
You kept repeating that part so much and made it look so important I thought you were pointing to that as a caveat.
Then I guess we were feeding each other's misunderstanding.
Those numbers from Denmark stuck in my mind for all these years exactly because I though they were counter-intuitive, and I thought they were counter-intuitive exactly because "helmets reduce the risk of head injury" is pretty much indisputable.
Well, good thing we could clear that misunderstanding then.
To finally actually say something about this: I guess it's possible that on impacts at certain angles, a helmet's shape can have some influence on injuries. But those seems to be such rare circumstances that I doubt it does have a visible expressions on statistics.
Well, it probably requires quite a lot of speed for the more elongated shape of a bicycle helmet to has enough impact on making the head rotate to actually cause damage and from what I read bicycle helmets are designed for collisions up to 15 km/h.
This would also explain why motorcycle helmets tend more towards a spherical shape as the average speed of a collision on a motorcycle is much higher.
Helmet studies typically have a bias for or against from the start. The reality is wearing a helmet is always safer, and would save lives of pedestrians and car drivers. However, making cycling as easy as walking means no helmet laws. In Netherlands, helmeted riders have more injuries because they tend to be the riders on expensive road race bikes going considerably faster in car traffic.
You writting one after the other just makes clear you're hugely biased in this as you basically put forward an absolute statement of yours "wearing a helmet is always safe" as objective truth whilst studies "typically are biased" or in other words, you know better than studies.
Definitelly agree that using numbers from injuries of cyclists with helmets in The Netherlands without any further considerations yields biased results for the reasons you described. It's not by chance that I did not quote such figures at all and in fact explicitly said from the start that people doing things like speed cycling and mountain biking should wear a helmet.
No idea were you pulled that specific argument you decided to counter in a response to my posts.
Specifically for The Netherlands and from the last link in my previous post, the only thing about them is the general belief there that "Promoting the use of bicycle helmets runs counter to present government policies that are aimed at the primary prevention of crashes (as opposed to secondary prevention) and at stimulating the use of the bicycle as a general health measure" which is really about not having mandatory helmet laws because it reduces cycling in general and how it's more important to push for safe cycling conditions (such as good cycle paths) than for cyclists wearing protection, all of which makes sense.
Personally I think that wearing a helmet or not should be down to each cyclist and should take in account the conditions they are cycling under, always remembering that wearing a helmet is not a silver bullet. My own experience of cycling in different countries (The Netherlands, England, Germany, Portugal) and different conditions is that the level of risk can be very different sometimes even from city to city, making helmet use more or less important relative to other things.
Again and above all, always keep in mind that wearing a helmet is not going to make you totally or even mostly safe, if only to avoid the increase risk taking due to a sense of increase safety exceeding the actual amount of increased safety from a helmet - as per risk compensation theory - which ultimatelly can make you less safe.
In my view your whole "wearing a helmet is always safer" absolutist posture is a needlessly dangerous mindset to have - it's far better to have a far more general approach to cycling safety in city traffic (which is basically what I went with when I moved from cycling in the far safer Dutch conditions to cycling in London, meaning that I ran around with all sorts of risk mitigation practices not just towards motorists on the road but even towards pedestrians in the sidewalk that were even adjusted depending in the area of London I was in) that thinking that just a helmet will make you safe.