I had a little bicycle accident today. Nothing really bad. I was riding back from a meeting, going to my office. This is normally a 15 minutes ride, from my advisor’s office to mine… had it not been for a hole. It appears to have been left by a road crew at some point. It’s a perfectly rectangular hole, blocking about half the shoulder. It’s conveniently located right in the middle of the nice wide shoulder there, exactly where you’d want to ride. To make it even worse, the hole is not very deep and not very wide, so you don’t tend to see it, so you don’t tend to see it far ahead of time. So I went right over it, had a short discussion with gravity and lost. Three cars were nice enough to stop, wondering if I was ok. This was nice. Nothing incredibly bad happened, only annoying.
More importantly, this made me think I should write this post about whether one should wear a bicycle helmet. I had been, for years, a strong supporter of bicycle helmets. Then I read a well formulated opinion which made me doubt bicycle helmets. I ran numbers on the back on an envelope two days ago which are making me reconsider again. I’m now pretty convinced bicycle helmets are indeed useful for most people riding bicycles. The justification below the fold.
Continue reading Going Down Hard: A Bicycle Helmet’s Perspective
