I grew up in Canada, where helmets are required by law and barely anybody cycles to commute. I immigrated to the Netherlands where cycling is a casual and de facto mode of transportation and helmets feel gratuitous and unnecessarily hampering. I'm currently visiting my family in Canada where the sidewalks are so icy simply stepping out of the house risks head injury, but nevertheless wearing a helmet to protect myself as a pedestrian seems gratuitous and unnecessarily hampering. Casual skating? Little to no helmets. Amateur ice hockey? People start wearing helmets.
Yes, wearing a helmet will protect you from a head injury from falling, but some things should be people centered and "it protects you" is really reductive. North America is really centered around automobile usage, even pedestrians are relegated to beg buttons and cycling nor simply walking about often doesn't feel like the casual activity that it can be.
You appear to have confused "requiring a helmet" with "has great cycle infrastructure, terrain, climate, population density and generations of social pressure".
The Dutch cycle because it's easier than driving. The reason it's safer comes down to many factors. Just the city planning and redevelopment to make it safe counts for most of it. They didn't get to this point by not requiring helmets.
I haven't confused anything. There are some debates in the Netherlands to require helmets and these debates focus on the injury prevention aspect to the exclusion of any other concern.
By comparing cycling to the injury risk of falling on ice or just tripping over your own feet, I'm appealing to people's intuition on the importance of balancing the mild inconvenience of a helmet, with the low risk of falling and the severity of injury of falling.
The article establishes that helmets are not designed for collision injury mitigation but instead falling. Helmet usage on ice typically increases with vigor of activity, and in the Netherlands you see the same intuition with helmet use: low velocity commuters rarely wear helmets, almost all high speed sports cyclists wear one. Laws and these debates on usage instead rarely show such common sense.
I use "confused" because you're mixing up a load of different things.
Comparing single factors between Netherlands and any other country is fraught. They have a hundred years on the rest of us, with an endemic cycling culture and physical safety considerations to keep most cyclists separated from traffic.
The numbers of commuters on a bike involves more than requiring a helmet or not.
Slipping on ice isn't comparable. This is a low speed accident where you often get to control your descent and protect the valuables. In the UK, 85% of on-road cyclist fatalities involved another vehicle, and that remaining 15% will include pedestrian collisions; the vast majority of deaths aren't from simple misadventure. They involve some speed.
So why bother? Because being "designed for" falling doesn't means they only work for falls. The article was pretty clear here, they lower impact damage, turning fatalities into hospitalisations and hospitalisations into [largely] unreported bumps.
Correlating sports cyclist helmet usage won't tell you much. Sports cyclists are usually required to wear a helmet by their events' and their personal insurers. You train in the same conditions.
These are hard things to discuss intelligently. Even looking at a single country, it's nearly impossible to subtract other factors to see if helmet laws worked. But it's still clear that hitting your head is a stupidly simple way to die, and those same impacts don't kill you if you're wearing a helmet.
Because unless you live and work in some of the pre-WW2 communities/cities/neighbourhoods, you probably live in car-centric suburbs, so the distances involved are impractical.
No, people commute on bicycles in the Netherlands even up to an hour (although the number of people doing so falls off rapidly with distance). Distance alone isn't the issue or even the leading issue.
I was consulting in Atlanta once and people thought I was insane to walk two miles to the office.
Don't get me wrong, the infrastructure is car centric, but the culture is very anti pedestrian and anti bicycle. It is a vicious cycle where the infrastructure pushes people to car culture and that drives the infrastructure. However the flipside of the culture is a lack of sympathy for pedestrians and cycling which creates a lot of tension and with it danger.
In North America, it seems to me, people view cycling as a child's activity or a dangerous sport. People push safety in both cases. In the Netherlands, at all distances, people are more willing to view cycling as an ordinary human activity from a commute to a vacation across the continent.
> I was consulting in Atlanta once and people thought I was insane to walk two miles to the office.
Culturally in the US South, walking is viewed as having a high correlation with poverty, so it's a low-class thing to do that people avoid as a signaling measure.
A relation that runs for exercise visited a semi-rural area there, and people would stop their cars and offer a ride because "not being in a car" was strange.
Yes, wearing a helmet will protect you from a head injury from falling, but some things should be people centered and "it protects you" is really reductive. North America is really centered around automobile usage, even pedestrians are relegated to beg buttons and cycling nor simply walking about often doesn't feel like the casual activity that it can be.