A ten-year nationwide study of the effectiveness of wearing a helmet while bicycling indicates that ten years ago, approximately 35 percent of all bicyclists reported wearing helmets, whereas today that number is nearly 80 percent.

A ten-year nationwide study of the effectiveness of wearing a helmet while bicycling indicates that ten years ago, approximately 35 percent of all bicyclists reported wearing helmets, whereas today that number is nearly 80 percent.

The author conclude that the government should improve people’s awareness of bicycle safety and downplay the importance of wearing helmets when riders are on the road. This argument is flawed in several critical aspects.

A threshold problem involves the content of bicycle-related accidents. The editor believe that bicycle-related accidents are the same as the accidents caused by bicycle. However, from many aspects, bicycle-related accidents and accidents caused by bicycle are totally different from each other. First of all, traffic accidents are related to the design and structure of roads. The transport agency does not partition car lanes and bicycle lanes, or lanes are too narrow, vehicles and bicycles have to run in the same lane, it is much more likely to have accidents because vehicles and bicycles have different volume and speed. Besides, even if riders follow the traffic regulations, they may still come across traffic accidents because vehicle drivers do not follow the regulations. In short, without ruling out those mentioned discrepancies, it is impossible to conclude that riders should be blamed for the bicycle-related accidents.

In addition, the arguer fails to establish a cause-and-effect relationship between people’s sense of safety and wearing helmets. It is highly possible that other factors are attributed to feeling safe. For instance, sense of safety might have resulted from high quality of bicycles. People may believe that their bicycles have better tyres and more reliable brake system, so this makes them feel they can face the emergencies more flexibly. It is also likely that reasonable and reliable design of roads lead to people’s sense of safety. Lacking the evidence that links sense of safety to wearing helmets, it is presumptuous to suggest that wearing helmets was responsible for feeling safe.

The author’s proposal depends on the assumption that once people receive the education about bicycle safety, there will be a smaller number of injuries from bicycle accidents. However, common sense informs me that this assumption is groundless. Some factors other than lacking education might cause the advent of bicycle accidents, such as infrastructure and road conditions. To be specific, it is dangerous to ride bicycles on the roads full of bumps and hollows. Without ruling out these and other possible causes, the author cannot justifiably conclude that education about bicycle safety lead to reduction of number of injuries from bicycle accidents.

Judging from all evidence offered, we may safely arrive at the conclusion that the editor’s recommendation that the government should put much more emphasis on the education about bicycle safety other than encouraging or requiring people to wear helmets is specious.