Dear Sir,

Peter Ward calls me a “professional maverick” (Letters, March 20th) .

The evidence confounding helmet advocates is on www.cyclehelmets.org, an international site supported by doctors, cycling safety experts, academic researchers and people with a professional involvement in helmet design and performance. The main British cycling organisations have shown concern about the current attempt to make helmets compulsory for children. The CTC publishes evidence showing that helmet wearing is not associated with real-life reduction in the rate or severity of cyclists’ injures. “Mavericks”?

The RDRF stresses the difference between endangering others and being endangered. We argue that an absence of cyclist or pedestrian casualties on a road may be because the danger on it may have scared cyclists and pedestrians off it, not because it is “safe”. We have shown how pandering to careless driving through provision of more crashworthy road and car environments can exacerbate bad driving behaviour. While many road safety and transport professionals support us, as well as the local authorities which have signed our charter, some traditional “road safety” practitioners do indeed regard us as “mavericks”.

The two main reasons for minimal or even negative reductions in casualty (and even head injury) rates following the take up of helmet wearing are: the lack of performance of the helmet on impact and adaptive behaviour by the user.

1. Ward claims that a helmet not designed for high-level impact with a car can turn a crash with a car (with the head taking the major impact) into one resulting in only minimal injury. This is dangerously misleading.

2. Behavioural adaptation to changed perception of danger is a phenomenon based on common sense and proven by voluminous evidence. It involves small changes (not “more aggressive behaviour”) – small, but sufficient to absorb safety benefits. It matters for cyclists when done by motorists in more crashworthy cars (something the “road safety” establishment does not like being pointed out). If cyclists do it, I’m not so worried (although some like Mr. Ward do seem to get quite upset at the idea that they may behave like other human beings). This limited device may give users some minimal leeway, while at least surrounding road users safety is largely unaffected.

But more importantly, it allows the anti-cycling culture we live in to trail a dangerous red herring across the path of real cyclist safety.

Dr. Robert Davis
Principal Policy Advisor, Road Danger Reduction Forum