I’ll be honest: I don’t like my bicycle helmet. It’s a cumbersome, ugly thing which, despite the best efforts of the manufacturers to render it stylish, still looks rather like a big, unflattering lump of polystyrene encasing my skull.
Not everyone in Oxford wears a helmet—in fact, only a quarter of cyclists in the UK don them—but, being a neuroscientist I feel like I ought to practice what I preach: I’ve read up on enough case studies of the horrible, devastating and sometimes bizarre outcomes a blow to the brain can result in to not adopt some basic precautionary measures. Yet, whether wearing a bicycle helmet reduces your risk on the road is still something of a contentious topic in the world of science.
Be warned: around a third of us cyclists in Oxford will be involved in some form of accident over the coming year. That’s according to statistics built up from the OxCam Cycling Survey which provides all sorts of interesting titbits about the habits and experiences of Oxonian bike-riders.
Generally, as a cyclist involved in an accident, wearing a helmet would be considered a good thing. One of the largest studies into the effectiveness of bike helmets to have been undertaken in the last decade, the Cochrane Review, concluded that wearing a helmet reduced the risk of head and brain injury following an accident by anywhere between 63 and 88%.
However, helmets are all well and good if you’re actually involved in an accident, but the majority of cyclists would prefer to avoid such a situation in the first place. One of the strongest arguments against the use of bike helmets is the much-touted risk compensation theory, the basic premise of which is that if people perceive themselves as somehow being safer in a situation, they are more likely to act in a riskier fashion. If a cyclist believes they are less likely to sustain injuries by donning a helmet, he or she is prone to ride just that bit more recklessly, taking a corner a touch faster, or running that amber light when they would otherwise have stopped, to the point where any added protection provided by the helmet could be offset by the increased chance of getting involved in an accident in the first place.
Is there any evidence to support this unnerving psychological speculation? When bicycle helmets were made compulsory in Australia back in 1992 the number of cyclists fell dramatically (probably due to many people’s reluctance to wear a helmet). However, for those still willing to go out riding, compulsory helmet use didn’t do much to reduce accident rates. In fact the fall in the number of cyclists was around twice as great as the corresponding drop in bike-related head injuries, suggesting that, if anything, those cyclists still out on the road now stood a greater chance of ending up in hospital. Other studies in Europe and the US however, found that increased rates of helmet use following educational campaigns correlated with a significant decrease in head injuries. Indeed, the authors of the previously-mentioned Cochrane Review argue that cyclists would need to up their risky behaviour fourfold before eliminating the protective effects of helmets.
But it’s not just the attitudes of cyclists that are at work here. Again figures from the OxCam survey listed 20% of accidents as involving some kind of motor vehicle. How motorists perceive and respond to bicycles is obviously an important factor; so, what influences their attitudes, and what can cyclists do to change them?
One of Britain’s top experts on the psychology behind cycling, Ian Walker, from Bath University, has done extensive research into the behaviour of motorists towards the humble cyclist. Attaching proximity sensors to his bike, Dr Walker found that how close traffic chose to come towards him while out riding in the streets correlated with whether or not he was wearing a helmet. In general, motorists actually tended to give him more space when he wasn’t wearing a helmet compared to when he was.
What’s going on here? Could this be risk compensation at work again? One would hope not, surely drivers would wish to avoid knocking over a cyclist in any situation, regardless of whether they thought the rider would be able to walk away afterwards. Instead, Dr Walker posits that wearing a helmet somehow makes a cyclist appear more ‘hardcore’. Being kitted out in the right gear gives drivers the impression that a cyclist is more serious and experienced, and therefore less likely to wobble unexpectedly into their path.
Now, as any scientist worth his or her salt knows, it’s important to keep tight control over one’s experimental variables. Thus, when Walker decided to investigate the impact of cyclist gender on motorist behaviour, rather than recruit a lady cyclist whose height, build and so on might compromise the core findings, he decided to repeat the experiments again by himself, only this time wearing a long wig, so as to render him ‘plausibly female from behind’. Under this disguise, Dr Walker found that vehicles were once again giving him more space on the road than when he was ‘obviously male’.
Do motorists respond differently to female cyclists? Are they just swerving to avoid the nutter in a wig? The idea that drivers may be acting upon some hilariously anti-feminist notion that we women are more ‘fragile’, or just more prone to losing our balance than men is irritating, but if it means they’re less likely to knock us off our bikes then maybe it’s something we can live with. Another possibility is that Dr Walker, however unintentionally, may have been behaving differently when in the guise of a woman, either himself cycling imperceptibly more cautiously, or doing so in a way which influenced drivers’ reactions to ‘him’.
Recent figures from the National Travel Survey only add to the psychological mess: they suggest that maybe drivers do have something to be wary of when it comes to women cyclists. Last year seven out of the eight cyclists involved in fatal collisions with lorries in London were women, a disproportionately high figure given that male cyclists outnumber their female counterparts nearly three to one. However, according to investigators such fatalities have more to do with cycling style than ability. Women cyclists show more of a tendency to stick to the rules of the road and stop at red lights, inadvertently placing themselves in the blind spots of adjacent trucks. Ironically, by cycling ‘recklessly’ and jumping red lights, male cyclists might actually be putting themselves out of danger in these circumstances.
So, what’s to be made of all this? As a woman, should I ditch my helmet, wear a floral dress and run red lights? I can’t say I’m wholly convinced. On balance? Hang on to your helmet, try to increase your risk-taking on the road by a factor of less than four, and consider dressing a little more effeminately if that’s your thing. It will at least provide a talking point in A&E.
