Beware! Frosty Roads Make for Perilous Morning Rides
Momentum has heard two other stories of falling cyclists this morning - and this note just came in from reader Bike Carter:
"I took a spill on a shaded, frost slicked round-about recently. The tires slipped out from under me as I leaned into a turn. I landed on my left hip and my head whip lashed against the asphalt. No big deal, just a bruise on my left temple and road rash on the hip. But the helmet is toast!
If I hadn't been wearing a helmet, it would've have been cracked skull and brains on toast.
Contrary to what people think, cyclists need to wear helmets as protection when falling off their bikes, not just when getting hit by cars. In fact statistically speaking, falling off a bike, is the most common of cycling accidents.
Many years ago, in the fall, while walking some children home from school, we came round a sharp corner on a tree lined street and there was a stunned cyclist on the ground. She had slipped on the slick wet leaves. It turned out to be Alison Sydor, multiple downhill world mountain bike champion. It can happen to anyone.
Why do you think they call it fall?"
Related reading: DIY studded tires
falling on your head
"If I hadn't been wearing a helmet, it would've have been cracked skull and brains on toast."
Speculation. Maybe you wouldn't have crashed at all if you hadn't been wearing the helmet. Or perhaps your injury was in fact exacerbated by the helmet. Or perhaps if you had more experience in such conditions you would have avoided the spill altogether.
The best defense from self-imposed cycling accidents is mindfulness, skill and awareness of road conditions. Alison Sydor is best known as an off-road rider. Pavement presents a very different set of challenges and is probably most hazardous to the overly confident. Perhaps she was going too fast for conditions?
All the safety equipment in the world cannot protect us from inexperience and poor judgment.
Helmets + icy roads
I totally agree about how wearing a helmet can help minimize these kinds of incidents. They can minimize something else too: I wear a helmet to decrease the risk of being legally blamed if/when a car DOES collide with me. Funny how your not wearing a helmet somehow causes your injuries, and your collision settlement therefore will be much lower.
A note on riding icy roads: even if you are a daily, all-season commuter; change your route on icy mornings to more wide and car-driven arteries -- the ice will be melted down by the cars' tires or by sand/snow. If the shoulder is icy, maintain your position on the roadway to remain safe.
Helmets not all they're cracked up to be
I crashed on ice last winter and landed with great force on my head. I really doubt that a conventional helmet would have helped much as I landed on my chin. What appeared to break my fall and sop up the blood was a new growth of thick beard.
A chin strap would have helped some I suspect. I can imagine hitting that spot with a full face helmet and having the helmet itself snap my neck. Without the help of a test engineer or crash testing of some sort this is all speculation, of course.
So, men grow your beards in winter! Nature put them there for a good reason. The Vikings knew what they were doing.
My advice to most non -bearded ladies out there is to wear some kind of beard device. A face merkin?
Clarification
Alison Sydor, was (and still is) a top ranked cross country mountain biker, NOT a downhiller.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alison_Sydor
That said, Alison has mad bike handling skills, so your point still stands. You can ride for years without incident, but it just one time where you crack your head on the pavement and your life can be changed for ever.
For example, one wintery day a friend went riding without a helmet (opting for a toque instead), slipped cracked his head on the pavement and now he can no longer smell and is still plagued by headaches.
I have also seen a few people go down (one of the bike parties) with out a helmet and actually crack their skull. They peed themselves when they got knocked out and ended up in an ambulance. A helmet would have reduced the injuries substantially.
Beware -- Bicycling on FROSTY Roads is Perilous
I think some readers might find "cycling on ice is dangerous" to be an obvious truism and ignore this article. The thing that I think a lot of cyclists don't realize is that "cycling on frosty roads is dangerous".
I'm guessing that the author was writing about a day we had here in Vancouver last week where the frost on the roads mixed with foggy morning moisture to create an extremely slippery situation in some areas of the city, while other areas were fine.
I've noticed that cyclists in general tend to exercise a lack of caution on frosty days. People seem to be wary of the kind of ice that you get when you freeze a puddle, or when compacted snow melts and freezes a few times. But I just don't think people appreciate how slippery frost can be. I know it took me a few wipe-outs before I figured it out.
The first time it happened for me was a traffic circle. The quick right-left-right that you have to do to get around these obstacles is exactly the kind of maneuver that will cause you to crash when the roads are slippery. As far as I could see, the roads looked totally fine, except maybe a faint white covering of frost. I went down so fast that there was no time to even think about it. I got in to work and found that someone else I work with had crashed their bike in the frost the same morning. Another friend of mine bruised her collarbone on a frosty day and was in pain for weeks.
When it's a cold, clear, frosty morning, I would recommend:
- Using knobby tires if you have them (my skinny commuting slicks weren't doing me any good the other day)
- When you see a patch of road that looks a bit frosty, lock up your back wheel intentionally to see how much traction there is. Do this at low speed and DONT TEST IT WITH YOUR FRONT BRAKE. Once you realize how little braking it needed to lock up your wheel, you will probably start riding a lot slower.
- Go slow downhill, especially if you are planning to turn at the bottom of the hill. The worst bike wipe-out I've ever seen was a lady who was going north on Heather St down the steep hill at Broadway too fast on a frosty morning, and tried to make the left onto the Off-Broadway route at the bottom of the hill.
- Take transit if it seems really bad.
Thanks - title changed
Hi mbcline
I've changed the story title - thanks for your good advice.
Helmets only protect against minor cuts and bruising
"If I hadn't been wearing a helmet, it would've have been cracked skull and brains on toast."
This just is not true. Helmet manufacturers themselves will not provide a guarantee that their helmets will do anything to prevent brain damage. They know full well that the amount of energy absorbed by a helmet is not enough to prevent diffuse axonal injury. See http://www.cyclehelmets.org for more information.
Sorry, helmets do provide protection
Arguments against helmets, in my opinion stem from semantics. This is because almost *any* activity will cause some brain cells to die (for example sneezing). Since we classify brain damage as cell death, NO measure can PREVENT brain damage when you fall. That said, if you fall chances are a helmet will substantially REDUCE brain injuries. This is why helmets are required for racing, as they are designed to REDUCE brain injury when you fall off a bike (which will happen at some point if you race long enough).
As for http://www.cyclehelmets.org claims, this has mainly to do with sampling issues of the studies and scope of a perceived prophylactic benefit. First, the sampling of these many of these studies have horrible reporting bias. If you fall off your bike, whack your helmet and get up without serious injury are you going to report your incident? Likely not. The same also goes for non-helmet riders.
Instead, most studies take data from people admitted to hospitals. These numbers are what are self-reporting and constitute a haphazard sample (we don't know the sampling structure). By contrast a random sample (gold standard) would take a random selection from ALL cyclists and compare accidents and injury rates between helmeted and non-helmeted riders.
Any conclusions drawn from a haphazard sample must be viewed with caution due to the unknown, and unverifiable, assumptions being made (e.g. the rates of non-reporting is the IDENTICAL for the helmeted and non-helmeted subgroups).
In addition, other confounding factors are not controlled in these studies. Perhaps helmeted riders take more chances than non-helmeted riders, or vice versa. There is no way to control for such differing hazard exposures in self reporting studies.
Finally, most of these studies like to cast the prophylactic benefit of helmets in terms of reducing injuring in a car-bike collision. However, bike helmets were only designed to reduce injury if you fall off your bike, so again any conclusions drawn should be eyed with caution.
However, in all the reading I have done, helmets appear to substantially reduce brain injury when you *fall* off a bike. Since your chances of slipping and falling are far higher on icy and frosty roads (compared to dry/warm conditions), not wearing a helmet is like asking for brain injury. It may not be today, this week or even this year. But if you expose yourself to the risk long enough, you will eventually have to pay the consequences.
Helmets are not designed to absorb much energy
Sure they do. I didn't argue to the contrary. What I argued was that they would not save you from splitting your skull and spilling your brains on the pavement. If you have a fall that serious then the helmet is probably about as much use as a lucky charm.
All arguments are about semantics. The whole issue of whether bike helmets are any use is gone into in excruciating detail in cyclehelmets.org and on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_helmet#Opponents
The data does suffer from the problems that you mention and the ideal would be a randomized case-controlled trial as mentioned in Dorothy Robinson's paper here: http://injuryprevention.bmj.com/cgi/eletters/12/6/353 However, the epidemeological data is probably better than the case-control studies according to standard accepted grading of these types of studies (see the wikipedia article for the reference to Phillips et al 2001). This population-level data gathered before and after the imposition of helmet bans in Australia, New Zealand and some Canadian provinces does not show the sort of results that you would expect if helmets are useful in preventing brain injury.
The bottom line is that you really can't say that a helmet prevented you from spilling your brains across the road. They're just not designed for it and even the bicycle helmet manufacturers will not make that claim. They are acutely aware that such a claim (which is the one that you're making) would open them up to numerous liability suits from the relatives of the huge number of cyclists who have died while wearing bicycle helmets. http://members.shaw.ca/jtubman/deadhelmet.html There are even serious arguments made that bicycle helmets increase the rotational momentum on the head leading to more serious injuries.
Sorry if you find this response to your personal anecdote irritating, I don't mean it to be and am merely responding because I worry that compulsory helmet wearing will become widespread on the foot of unsupportable beliefs. Glad you're not hurt.
Again your comments are misleading
The news item is not my personal anecdote, I commented because I feel you were misleading readers on the issue of helmet usage. The news article is about slipping on ice/frost while riding and hitting one's head on terra firma as a result.
You argue that if a person has a "serious" fall helmets are of no use. What you have not defined is what constitutes a "serious" fall. If by serious you mean a collision with a fast moving car or truck, then I agree, helmets will provide little help in this situation. If however, you mean any fall off a bike where you hit your head, then I strongly disagree.
Riding your bike, slipping on an icy patch, and falling is the exact scenario in which cycling helmets were designed to deal with. Cycling helmets are designed for impacts up to 20km/hr. To suggest comment that helmets are useless on an article about just such a scenario is not only misleading but it is also irresponsible. If you are riding on frosty roads, it is probably wise to wear a helmet, since your chances of falling are much higher.
Within the wider context of cycling helmets and all possible hazards faced by cyclists, including car/bike collisions, the results are not clear (see the Wikipedia article). There is still much debate, and here I agree that cycling helmets are not a replacement for cycling infrastructure that removes or reduces car/bike collisions, a solution many North American politicians unfortunately try to push.
Finally, even within this context we need to keep in mind that a lack of a response (i.e. no substantial reduction in head injuries after helmet laws were invoked) does not constitute support for the argument that helmets have no positive effect. A lack of response in a study can be due to a number of factors including poor study design, the inescapable nature of many epidemiology studies. Since we both agree that the current set of studies have serious flaws, to draw firm conclusions either way is dangerous.
That said, while it is debatable whether helmets will save you from all dangers (i.e. car/bike collisions), there are a few things that are clear:
Thanks!
Thanks for putting in the effort to replying to these statements about helmets.
How anybody can seriously argue that head protection, particularly bicycle helmets that are designed to provide impact protection when cycling at cycling speeds, don't actually provide any protection (or, even worse than no protection at all) is beyond me. Probably the same people who will argue that face masks, visors, and heck guards don't provide any protection to hockey players? Or that seat belts don't save lives in cars (try some physics regarding conservation of momentum on this one).
Anyway, anybody who has actually fallen off their bike and hit their head on the ground while wearing a helmet (like I have a number of times by accident, not from being foolish) knows how effective they are - I've ended up with lots of knee and hip injuries but not a single scratch or bruise on my head.
Studded tires may or may not help
Just a quick FYI - there is a link at the bottom of the article linking to a
studded tire article. Those tend to only work for ice on snow, as the solid stud has somewhere to go.
For the thin sheets of ice on paved roads the metal studs will have nothing to bite into. As a result in our urban black ice conditions these tires end up providing *less* grip than conventional tires.
I know of no way to ride safely on the roads when black ice is present.
Tips on winter riding
Good point about the danger of frosted roads. They may appear OK, but may in fact be slippery. In Toronto, they usually use a lot of salt, but there are other hazards such as black ice, white ice and streetcar tracks.
A few days ago we wrote an article on our blog called: "The adventure of riding a bicycle in the winter: tips and suggestions." See
http://deliciousearth.wordpress.com/2007/12/04/the-adventure-of-riding-a...