This is the first stop on our journey round the reasons helmet laws fail, so lets get ourselves ready.
Before you ride
Now we are prudent cyclists, aren’t we? Safe, careful, calm and measured. Mostly. Or maybe we are nutters who like to bunny hop over taxis at traffic lights, whatever. But whatever, there is no way we would leave home without checking the brakes is there? Of course not. We carry out our own very simple safety checks which might go something like mine:
- as you wheel the bike out, apply the front brake gently, listen for unusual sounds, check it pulls cleanly and works
- same with the back brake
- snatch the front brake a couple of times and feel for looseness in the headset
- make sure your luggage is securely attached
- if it’s dark or getting that way, check the lights.
Rocket science is easy. Rocket engineering is the difficult bit.
Not exactly onerous. Could be more comprehensive, but I ride my bike most days and an extensive check is not really necessary, since i listen for and fix issues as they come up. You can make up a longer checklist if you like, of course, and for infrequently used bikes, or before a big ride, or before some harsh offroad you will want to do things like a spoke ping test, feel for play in wheel and pedal bearings, but let’s not get too bogged down in detail. The message I’m trying to get across here is that before getting on the bike, the smart move is to check, very simply, that the number one piece of safety equipment, the brakes, is in good order.
Some manuals say you should sand your brake blocks weekly, or do extended tests or whatever, and maybe they are right for some riders. I ride the bike a lot, I know exactly how the brakes should feel.
Now, go to your favourite helmet promotion website and see where this advice is listed.
In the zeal to promote helmet use, many – probably most – liddites completely forget that the best way to survive a crash is not to have it in the first place.
And because they promote helmets as the sine qua non of cycle safety, the number one safety intervention, people infected with lidditis will spend time checking their helmet for fit and forget all about the brakes.
Would you be that foolish? I hope not. You know, I am sure, that risk management theory says you should start by removing risk at source, then reduce exposure to risk, and only if those fail, apply personal protective equipment.
John Adams, an expert on risk management, talks about fault trees. All the way along the tree we make choices, and at each choice the branch fault tree forks until we have dozens, maybe hundreds, of endpoints, all subtly different. One of these might contain an injury. And once it’s happened it’s easy to work back up the fault tree identifying the “wrong” choice at each point. Liddites stop at the last but one: maybe a plastic hat would have helped. But they completely ignore the vast canopy of branches where there was no bad outcome at all, because we went out onto a safer branch to start with.
So helmet laws fail because they start from the wrong premise. They work back from the end.
Also
helmet laws fail because they ignore the fundamentals - a bike “safety” campaign which does not start with the bike itself, is surely not a genuine bike safety campaign
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