Religious People Don’t Need Helmets, Right?

There must be a market for over-turban helmets.

This is completely besides the point, of course, but there are rational reasons for being against this law. Bike helmet laws cause people to use their bikes less.* Large-scale studies suggest that the benefits of these laws (when an accident happens, fewer and less problematic injuries occur) are outweighed by the harm caused by the laws (people use the car instead of their bike, they move less, which has health costs of its own).

I think this wouldn’t apply to a law that only applies to children, though I suspect that the age limit should be lower than 18 for optimal results.

* Wikipedia: “Studies from China, Denmark, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom show that regular cyclists live longer because the health effects far outweigh the risk of crashes.  A reduction in the number of cyclists is likely to harm the health of the population more than any possible protection from injury.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_helmet#Undesirable_effects_of_helmet_use

Wait! 54 kids in 5 years were hospitilized for head related bike injuries. That’s 11 per year in an entire province. That’s a greater than one in a million chance that a specific child will succumb to a bicycle related head injury every year. This law seems a bit much regardless of the stupid religious part of it.

It’s a bad law. The evidence base on this suggest that laws like this cost lives.

Besides which, it really should be up to individuals to make their own choices about levels of risk, regardless of whether it’s on religious grounds or simply personal preference – we don’t ban other dangerous activities (like sport or eating at McDonalds) because people might need to use the health service. It’s rather inherent in universal healthcare that you don’t have to qualify for it.

Many Sikhs wear do-rags; they can certainly wear that under a bike helmet. 

This bill is intended for children.  Half the Sikh population never wears turbans… girls.  Would female children who are Sikh wear helmets?  Also, boys who are Sikh don’t wear turbans (I’m unsure at what age they start, but I think it may be in their teen years).   I don’t understand the reasoning behind the exception.

This is really going to get the Sikh community upset, isn’t it? You might even say hot under the collar, right?

I guess you could call this bill a Sikh-heating missive, right?

…

I’ve waited nearly 20 years to used that joke. Thank you. Now I can get on with my life.

Duke

 I’m not Ewan, but a case is made here, and they have links:  http://bicyclesafe.com/helmets.html

I don’t buy some of the arguments though, complaining that car users should wear helmets too, when the car itself is a huge protective device, a bike rider has nothing in comparison.

I don’t really get the idea that a helmet requirement discourages riding to a significant degree, they didn’t back that up that I found.

There’s a lot more, I need to go to work now.

 Way to go Duke.

The argument that letting Sikh riders take on additional risk might cost taxpayers for their care leads in one short step to banning cheeseburgers.  Noooooo! Not the cheezeburgers!

Seriously, many people take on additional risk for personal reasons. We’d end banning some sports, possibly bicycles, rollerblades, skateboards, all rock climbing. 

There are other arguments for the law that are more compelling. The most obvious one is that we’re all morons when it comes to assessing risk and sometimes need to be prompted to take basic steps to protect ourselves. 

The Sikh are being morons about this. I used to not wear a helmet, and in an active life I’ve had a number of concussions from different activities. Didn’t realize the injury they cause is cumulative until after that last one I found myself severely balance-impaired and with cognitive difficulties. That was about 8 years ago and through extensive physical therapy I have finally recovered my original balance. But I still have problems concentrating and with memory.

I had all kinds of arguments for why I didn’t need a helmet. Now I realize that I’m an idiot and I wear a goddamn helmet. 

Let them opt out of wearing helmets based on their religious belief, and let natural selection take its course. 

 As a fellow Ontarian, I approve this message.  😉

In the UK Sikhs are exempt from Motorcycle crash helmets, and safety headgear in the workplace http://www.sikhiwiki.org/index.php/Turban,_UK_Legislation_Regarding_its_use_by_Sikhs

Only Fools is way ahead of you:

https://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=crash%20turban&ion=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.,cf.osb&biw=1502&bih=992&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=iw&ei=bS–T7TmK4rT8gPhnKFb 

Although I broadly agree with you on the normalisation issue I’m not sure if this is the way to go about it.  The evidence isn’t there yet for the effectiveness of bicycle helmets in preventing serious injuries on a large enough scale. The numbers they’re quoting seem pretty small.

What difference does it make what your religion is when it comes to head injury?!

Exactly.  Religious belief is itself a form of head injury.

A few years ago Ontario won a legal battle with a Sikh over wearing a helmet on a motorcycle.

I think the exemption makes sense.  The point of the law is to make certain an injury doesn’t render you mentally feeble.  And if you think your religion means you don’t have to worry about being injured, then it’s clearly too late for that.

I find cases like this so interesting because old religious practices are running head first into modernity.
Like the Islam banning the depictions of the human form (to prevent idolatry).  It makes it very hard to make a movie, broadcast the news or fill a TV station’s line-up if you really, really stick to that one.
Or the Amish refusing to cool the milk they sell to milk producers (because they eschew electricity). Big milk companies might not want to buy it and take the risk of contaminating their product.
Or the Hindus bathing and dumping cremated remains in the Ganges. It might have been okay before big cities arose around the Ganges but today you are immersing yourself in a cesspool.
Asking for exemptions is only a stop-gap. At some point the religions seem to give into the greater culture around them. Which is one reason that some of them work so hard to subvert and destroy the greater culture around them, I guess.

Your comment was the most ridiculous thing I’ve read all day, and I started the morning with a cup of coffee, a healthy bowel movement, and a 20 minute bible reading session.

As a cyclist here in Canada when friends don’t wear bike helmets I thank them for keeping the costs of health care down.  (It was the same with seat belts).   They think about it for a while and then catch on.

 I’ve never seen an actual case of sarchasm until now.

seatbelts and bike lights are mandated in the UK.  Motorcycle helmets are also compulsory, but not push bike helmets.

As a UK cyclist I would resist compulsory helmets.  Personally I wear a helmet when on the road or mountain biking as do most other people,  but travelling on an off-road bike track, I do not bother because I think that the risk is much lower and it is a risk I am willing to take.   

Helmet laws screw up the natural selection process and contribute to over population, starvation and the watering down of our species gene pool. Stupid laws.  

It’s harder to recover from a cranial injury than an injury to any of those other parts.

 The government pays for head injuries that a helmet could of prevented while walking and driving. Since the risks are more or less the same for driving, walking, biking I am not sure I see your point.

All the likes.

I have a solution for the Sikhs- wrap a turban on the outside of a helmet and keep it there permanently. They can wear the helmet all day long and nobody will know, plus they’ll be safe from head injuries. Problem solved!

Personally I don’t care if people refuse to wear a helmet an die because of it.

Actually I would prefer that people die from their own stupidity and/or delusional thinking as much as possible. It only makes the the species stronger for it.
Bike helmets being the best case scenario, gene pool gets weeded out while no one else is hurt. Love it.

 *groan*

Well-played.

Sikhs and helmets in Canada has been ongoing since at least the early 80s.

My personal beef is helmet laws that target just kids.  Here in California everyone under 16 must wear a helmet on anything with wheels.  So a kid on a bigwheel must, even though she’s at more risk of overheating than of falling and hitting her head.

I think it gives the impression that helmets for adults matter less, since they’re not mandated.

I often see families out for a ride where the kids all have helmets just about falling off because they’re not on properly, and the adults without helmets.  But the adults are just as unsteady and likely to fall as the kids.  Having an adult head doesn’t make you less prone to injury, it just means you have farther to fall.

Kind of like how hands-free cell phones are legal, which gives the impression that hand-free is perfectly safe.  If you regulate one aspect of something, you imply that the other aspect is just fine.

Am I getting off topic?  Oh, ok.  Honestly, this strikes me as a pretty innocuous religious exemption (even in single payer health care Canada) considering some of the other things out there.  I wonder if we shouldn’t try handing out more exemptions.  Give anyone who asks an exemption to anything on religious grounds.  I’ll get me an ordination from the back of Rolling Stone which allows me to leave my kid home alone for 30 min. 

The religious exemption and “If I don’t want to wear a helmet, you can’t make me!” are really getting at the same thing.  The core of the libertarian objection to laws like this is that different people have different needs and imposing one standard that everyone must follow is not good for a diverse community.  The fact that this law would negatively impact Sikh’s is a perfect example of this.  They are rational people and can weigh for themselves the costs and benefits of helmets and I respect them enough to let them make their own choice.  As Hemant points out, there’s no reason to have a specific religious exemption for this law, as it’s rationality (however much rationality there is) applies equally to all.  But contrary to Hemant’s conclusion, the fact that the law doesn’t work well for Sikhs doesn’t imply that they should be required to follow it anyway but instead demonstrates why no one should be required to follow it.  (That said, I wear a helmet when I bike and suggest that you consider it as well.)

From a financial perspective, it’s worth noting that this program is also incredibly costly for very little benefit.  Bike helmets normally sell for around $20.  Since these are low cost, let’s drop 25% and call it $15.  Then that gives us $15×73,000=$1,095,000 in bike helmets costs just through this program (and so not counting the costs of bike helmets purchased by individuals outside of this program).  By contrast, there were 54 cycling-related head injuries over a period of five years, so around 10.8 per year.  Since these 73,000 are just a subset of the biking population, it’s unlikely that this would prevent all of them, but let’s be generous and say that it does.  Is it really a good use of tax money to pay around $101,389 per injury prevented per year?

As I mentioned in a separate post above, once you factor in the cost of helmets, this program costs over $100,000 per injury prevented per year.  I’d imagine that the average medical costs for a head injury are much smaller than this.  Assuming that you’re seriously basing your decision solely on financial considerations rather than on a selfish desire to impose your values on others, shouldn’t your policy instead be that the government should ban helmets since paying the medical costs is less expensive than paying for the helmets?

 I thought that’s what they did already…

I kid, I kid

Helmet threads on cycling forums go religious with great regularity.  The anti-helmet law people are very convincing when they describe how the studies about injuries and helmets are severely flawed and not nearly as comprehensive as the pro-helmet law supporters would like you to believe.  Most safety-conscious riders shrug their shoulders and wear one anyway.

Sikhs make the news a lot about these kind of rules – helmets, hard hats, uniform caps, etc.  Seems they usually win the lawsuits that I read about.

And they are dumb not to. And it doesn’t mean that it makes bicyclists safer because of lazy Harley riders and squids. I’m a daily motorcycle rider, I ride easily 1000 miles a month and I am ATGATT. Bicycle helmets are toys.

 the government pays for HIV drugs and sti treatment too. I have no desire to see a mandated condom law.

If I had to wear a worthless bike helmet when riding my bike or get a $50 ticket, I’d rather take my car. There’s your proof.

That’s the equivalent of an anecdote, not proof of how the population at large would react.

On the face of it, it seems silly.  That’s like people saying they would quit driving if they were required to use a seat belt.  I don’t think that’s happened.

So, based on your data, we’re talking about  injuries that a helmet could prevent, about one per month (54 child cycling head injuries over 5 years), in a pool of apparently 73,000 cycling children, if we assume the government subsidized enough child helmets for the province.

Less than one per thousand over 5 years in Manitoba.  About one per month across the province. 

I’m not sure this is enough to require legislation.

Of course not, but isn’t it illegal to transmit STIs to people?

Why can’t they just integrate protective helmets into their head-covering habits?

As long as the thread is getting mucked up with questions about whether helmet laws are a good thing, or (the main point) religious exceptions are an inexplicable thing… Much of the statistics about helmet efficacy reflect the poor fitting that most helmets receive. Correct fitting is essential and much better addressed by public information campaigns and bike shops. (Note: most the largest number of bikes are probably sold at Wal-Mart and they sure as hell aren’t going to fit a helmet for you).

Do your research on helmets before talking about this law. Bike helmet effectiveness is questionable at best, and mandatory helmet laws have been shown to cost lives, because they discourage cycling, which contributes to obesity and other health problems, and also makes cycling less safe for those who keep cycling, due to a decreased number of cyclists (there is safety in numbers). If this law made sense, I’d support your point, but it just does not.

Why am I the only one who thought that someone should make helmets that are able to fit the turban underneath it so their heads are protected and they can believe the dogma of their choice?

I live in Ontario too, and rarely see anyone wearing a helmet. Bike cops do, most bike couriers, but other than that…