Thoughts on Noggins

I was a relatively broke graduate student working in a bike shop when I told my parents I planned to spend $60 on a bike helmet. The LeMond Air Attack from Giro retailed for $90—the most expensive bike helmet on the market at the time, but I could get a discount on one through the shop I worked for. Why I felt a need to inform my parents of my purchase owes to the fact that this truly was a big purchase for my meager income.

They weren’t what I’d call supportive. When they each asked me why I was going to blow so much on a helmet, I was blunt. “I like having conversations and don’t much like feeding tubes.” (Not that I’d had any first-hand experience with feeding tubes.)

They grew supportive.

I’ve been a religious helmet wearer for nearly the entire time I’ve been a cyclist, and I’ve worn more different types of helmets over the years than I’d ever have thought could populate the cycling market. At this point, I have helmets much the way I have bikes. I’ve got helmets for road, mountain, aero needs, another road helmet that I keep because the fit is loose enough to wear a cycling cap beneath it, plus full-face for those days where I want to work on my airtime. I also have one for commuting and errands, because most road and mountain helmets look silly (okay, sillier) when paired with cotton.

But I haven’t been wearing that commuter helmet lately.

Some of you may known the name Peter Flax. He is the editor of the Red Bull Magazine, The Red Bulletin, and was formerly the editor of Bicycling magazine. Peter is also the most dedicated bike commuter I know. When I still lived in Los Angeles, he lived nearby and we rode from time to time on the weekends. He’s delightful company, and it was on those rides that I learned that he was putting in serious daily miles commuting, and doing so in all of the weathers.

Some time back, Peter shared on social media that he had stopped wearing a helmet on his commutes. Had it been anyone else, I’d have been scandalized, but my respect for Peter is such that I checked my both my knee and my jerk and took the time to really consider the argument he was making.

Peter ran across a British study that examined whether drivers give riders more room when they weren’t wearing a helmet. The thesis was that drivers saw helmetless riders as more vulnerable, so the drivers gave the riders a little extra room. Peter stopped wearing his helmet in an experiment to see whether the drivers on his commute might do the same.

Riding the same commute over and over lends a particular perspective. You get to know the choke points, the places where drivers ignore the light or the stop sign or speed limit, the stretches where you have to ride farther into the lane than you’d like. It develops into a kind of rhythm. My point here is that Peter possessed a calibrated sense of how drivers treated cyclists on his commute.

He reported that drivers were, in fact, giving him a wider berth. Had it been anyone else, I don’t think I would have believed them.

I think it took me a year to get up the nerve to try riding my cargo ebike without a helmet. I continued to wear a helmet for all of my other riding, and even when I had a longer errand to run. When I started I wasn’t sure how I would quantify any difference, if there was one. However, what emerged was too obvious to miss.

I hate to admit it, but when a driver makes a close pass, I react with irritation and that irritation tends to stick with me for longer than I’d like. What I noticed wasn’t that drivers were giving me a wider berth. I noticed that drivers were subjecting me to fewer close passes.

Here’s what I find disturbing: Nothing in my cycling life has made as much of a difference to my sense of safety than drivers allowing me more space when they pass. Go figure.