Quote:
Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
Our society's collective assessment of risk is terrible. There's very little correlation between things we worry about and the things that actually do us harm. The most dangerous thing, by far, most of us do in our day-to-day lives is drive. And yet there would be fierce opposition to mandating helmets in cars, even though they would undoubtedly save many lives and prevent thousands of serious injuries. More pedestrian suffer head injuries than cyclists, and yet our society has deemed bike helmets essential while nobody wears a helmet when they're walking.
Safety is always a trade-off. I feel I'm better equipped to assess those trade-offs than public sentiment. Just as I'm not going to let the public hysteria over child abduction prevent my kids from playing outdoors unsupervised, I'm not going to let blanket assumptions about the necessity of helmets dictate my behaviour.
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You're allowed to put your kids at whatever risk you're comfortable with (up to the point where you're putting them in obvious guaranteed danger), but that doesn't mean others should follow your example.
The whole idea that just because we aren't safe all the time means we can't add safety measures to certain actions some of the time makes no sense.
It should be noted that head injuries for cyclists have fallen significantly since the introduction of helmets, to the point where (as you said) they're below pedestrians. If you wanted to disprove the usefulness of safety protection, citing the fact that cyclists (helmet wearers) are below pedestrians (non-helmet-wearers) in head injuries despite engaging in a more dangerous action was a very bad way to go about it.