Our motorcycle helmets are three years old this month, so it’s time to replace them.
The manufacturers say 5 years, but we wear them almost every day, and live in smoggy Southern California, so our white Shoei RF1000’s are headed for the bin in the garage.
We just ordered new ones, and I thought I’d take a moment – for those folks who ride or know people who ride – and make a few comments.
First, let me be really clear. No one should ride a motorcycle without a helmet – in my view, a full-face helmet. Why? The answer is just under the fold.
Here’s the helmet TG was wearing five seven years ago when she crashed on Breckinridge Rd. in central California. She was going about 40 when she hit gravel, tucked the front end, and flew over the bars – landing on the shield and chinbar of her helmet.
She was knocked unconscious and concussed…but imagine what would have happened if she’d been wearing an open-face helmet or no helmet at all. I do, often.
I’ve always bought the best helmets I could afford, and this buying cycle was no different. But our buying decision was also influenced by this article, in Motorcyclist magazine – which pointed out that for street riding, the best helmets – the Arais, Shoeis, etc. – might not be the safest.
Why? Because they are manufactured to meet the Snell standard, which requires an extremely rigid helmet. Rigid enough to pass too much impact on to your fragile brainstem.
Instead, they found that for low-speed (non-racing speed) crashes, the safest helmets were often the cheapest. The highest-ranked helmet they tested was the ZR-1, an $80 helmet I never would have even looked at. After the test, I bought one for Littlest Guy.
The helmet is noisy, not as comfortable as a higher-end one, and probably won’t wear as well. But for the infrequent times he rides on the back of my bike, it may just keep his annoyingly precocious noggin safe.
Yesterday, TG and I bought helmets that meet the European standard for safety – meaning that they are softer. She got an AGV Ti-Tech, and I bought a Shark RSR2.
Once we’ve ridden with them for a while, I’ll give some opinions.
Yes, I know that – in very few cases – people have been injured or killed by their helmets. A few people are killed by drugs that save hundreds of thousands as well; you have to weigh the odds. And for those who say that they can’t see or hear as well in a helmet – I’ll call bull. I’ve ridden once with an open-faced helmet, and even with good glasses, the wind in my eyes meant that I couldn’t see nearly as well as I can in the still air inside my visor. And the wind noise in my naked ears is louder than the noise my ears are subjected to inside a helmet.
So if you know someone who rides…send them this picture and link. I may talk about the issues in making helmet use mandatory some time soon. That’ll get some comments…
The wind noise at 50 mph or over will drown out all other noises. Hearing just isn’t a sense you can rely on when traveling at any significant speed on a motorcycle.
As best I can tell, the full face helmets reduce the wind noise enough to partially protect your hearing at highway speeds. For trips of any distance I wear my foam 33db earplugs that I use at the pistol range or my Etymotic er-6i earphones with an MP3 player. The Etymotic earhones are noise isolating so that I can actually hear the music without having to turn it up any louder than I would on the bus or subway, and they don’t have the extra bulk around the ears so they’ll fit under a full-face helmet. That makes 2+ hour rides a lot more pleasant.
I have a Nolan N100E flip-up helmet. I’ve gotten nailed in the chest a couple of times by rocks kicked up off the road. Even through a thick winter jacket with an extra sweater underneath it was a noticeable impact. If it had hit me in in the face without a visor I’d have ended up in the emergency room or dentist’s office. I also had a very minor spill when I had just upgraded to a heavy bike. I didn’t hit the ground hard enough to make a mark on the helmet, but based on how I was lying I probably would have conked my chin quite nicely.
I’ll be interested to read your thoughts on mandatory helmet laws. I wouldn’t ride without one, ever, but I’m not sure I see the benefit in adding a law about it if someone’s common sense has already failed them so severely to not figure it out on their own.
I wear foamies also – in fact one (minor) accomplishment was to have legalized them in California, where custom earplugs were legal, but equally effective foam ones weren’t (??) – and occasionally a set of Etymotics like yours . I’ve worn the Etys to listen to music on long highway trips, but find that I can’t listen to music in traffic or when sportriding – I can’t explain why, exactly, but it messes up my timing on the bike quite badly.
I like the idea of flip-up helmets, but TG’s crash left me feeling that I’m unwilling to compromise shell strength – at all – in the chin area. If I was a police officer, or someone who had to stop and talk to people while riding my bike, I might feel differently.
A.L.
[A bunch of simple college dorm bull session blanket statements elided]
There, that should get a few of ‘ya going!
[Actually, not so much. Please review the WoC “comments policy.”:http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/003367.php
Behavior of the kind you just indulged in is deprecated here. If you care to stick around and contribute something reasoned, great. If not, be aware that we ban for trolling. –NM]
A.L.:
Great picture, great message. My contribution: helmets aren’t just for motorcyclists. Any activity that involves better-than-human speed on hard surfaces demands protective gear–that includes skiing, bicycling, and skateboarding. My bike and ski helmets have plenty of ugly dings that are better left on the helmet than on my head.
Planter:
Common sense isn’t common practice: the ski slopes abound with families whose children sport the latest and greatest helmets and goggles, while Dad (the guy who pays all the bills) blasts down the blacks wearing nothing but a baseball cap and some Ray-Bans.
(#4)
Each time I ski I become more convinced of that. However, I am afraid I am still looking like the Dad.
Driving motorbikes, with helmet or without it, is always a very dangerous issue. I’ve known all kinds of injuries and deaths linked to them. You are all crazy!
I’ve got a 1963 Vespa VBB and I admit I’ll sometimes tool around the neighborhood without my helmet.
My wife screams bloody murder to my cries of “it’s just a scooter” but she’s right, as usual.
Similar to old-school automobiles with rigid steel frames, where the vehicle might survive a high-speed collision largely intact, but the driver (though seat-belted) would be dead or severely injured.
Modern racing cars, on the other hand, tend to disintegrate in a spectacular fashion on impact. It would have horrified a 70s engineer, but it’s significantly more survivable.
Any recommendations about helmets for off-road riding? Mine is old too.
Great post AL,
I do not ride a Motorcycle. But I am thinking about wearing both a Motorcycle helmet and a Category IIA Kevlar vest even when driving on long highway road trips.
Hear me out before you call me a nut :
1) Many auto fatalities and near-fatalities have to do with a person’s face (including eyes) being permanently shredded by the windshield glass. Believe me, you do not want this to happen – some things are worse than death.
2) Another source of fatalities is the impact of the steering column on the chest. The light Kevlar vest could increase your protection from this.
3) I am only talking about wearing this on road trips that involve many hours of driving at 70+ mph (the speed where fatalities are probable). I am not talking about doing this in my daily commute which does not involve highway driving, and where speeds don’t exceed 35 mph (usually too slow for getting killed).
4) Of course, 42,000 people die in car crashes a year, and a much larger number are injured.
So people will laugh that I wear a helmet in the car. So word will spread that I am overcautious. So what? Believe me, if you have seen photos of people who have gone head-first through windshields, you would not think my idea is so outlandish.
A light IIA Kevlar vest looks like a normal jacket, and maybe costs $500. This, plus a helmet, might reduce my chance of dying or being blinded + disfigured in an auto accident by 50-80%, I figure.
Feedback, please.
GK,
I don’t know what good a bullet-resistant vest might do, but race cars’ pilots all wear helmets. So yes, I think one of those would reduce risks in case of crash. A helmet designed for use in cars may be better than a motorcycle one.
Fabio,
Hmm.. a specially-designed helmet for cars (wider field of vision, perhaps) might be a great business idea…..
The Bulletproof vest idea is the product of :
1) The fact that it looks like a normal jacket and is pretty light due to new material science advancements.
2) May police officers have said that their lives have been saved due to the ‘Blunt Trauma’ protection the vest provides.
I don’t mind spending the $500-$700 if it reduces the chance of injury by any significant degree.
It might also be useful for motorcycle riders – again, the ‘blunt trauma’ risk.
AL:
I no longer ride but did when I lived in NYC. I used to commute between Queens and Manhattan every day on a KZ550 and would never get on it without a full face helmet.
I live in PA now and a few years ago they lifted the helmet law. I am astonished by the number of guys (and women) who take their lives in their hands by riding with no helmet at all. Stupid is as stupid does, I guess.
I hope you never need to use your helmet, but enjoy them every day, if you catch my drift.
I am guessing it was the Darwinian selection comment that offended you.
Actually, the rest of my college dorm blanket statements were perfectly serious- I do not believe the Government has any business protecting people from themselves.. Someone always jumps in here and revs up the “cost to society” argument- accept that one and sooner or later you will have Government inspectors looking in your kids lunchbox for twinkies and making sure your shower has the required anti slip coating. Keep the cotton swaddled society far away please- if we need to see how it works we can always refer to England.
Do I ride with a helmet? Yes. Should it be required? No.
Let me restate this to be absolutely clear
If you choose to ride a motorcycle without a Helmet, you are Nuts. Foolish.
But you have a right to be foolish with your own head. Rescind that right, and soon the very act of riding a motorcycle will be legislated away.
I have been an active motorcyclist for 35 years-and among all my biker friends I do not think I could find one who thinks car drivers drive better today than then. Cars are safer, folk drive worse. Law of unintended consequences. The bumper car mentality was exemplified by the centerfold in National Geographic a few years ago – some lady in a Hummer stated she loved it because “whenever I hit something,I win”.
Americans have become enamored of passive “magic pill” solutions- just like the above case in cars- build a better tank instead of learning to DRIVE better. I am seriously thinking of sending my kid to Bondurants school to learn some driving skills for evasive action. How many times have you seen someone plow right into another vehicle instead of avoiding it? Happens all the time with bikers- a hell of a lot of them can’t stop worth a damn. Like Harry Hurt said -“USE the front brake” use the FRONT brake” Use the front BRAKE”
I bought a motorcycle after I got married in 1980. We couldn’t afford two cars and my wife had to have a car as condition of her employment. So I got a Kawasaki 440LTD.
If you ride, remember that there are only two kinds of bikers: those who’ve wrecked and those who are going to.
I rode the Kwacker for 17 months. Then a man driving an International Harvester stake and platform truck ran a yield sign and t-boned me.
Bike was totaled. I was almost totaled. I had on a full-face helmet and it saved my live. After I got my things back, I saw that the visor had been scraped entirely opaque as I blasted at 35 mph across the pavement. Without that visor, I would have lost my entire face and most likely my life from the uncushioned impact witht the asphalt.
As the dealer told me, “If you have a ten-dollar head, buy a ten dollar helmet.” (This was in 1980, when even first-rate helmets cost $40-$50.) So I invested in a good helmet and lived to tell the tale.
Read and heed, people, read and heed.
AL- I picked out a flip-front helmet after I rode my current bike back for a couple hours from where I bought it in Virginia in late July. The heat was brutal, and highway speeds did nothing to ameliorate it. Before I bought it, I did a lot of research about helmets and felt secure that I wasn’t sacrificing any measurable safety. (Similar to picking the safety standards for a helmet in the article you linked to above, which I also read prior to picking up a helmet). Motorcyclecruiser.com had a “review”:http://tinyurl.com/2pvdx3 of the flip-fronts that gave the Nolan good marks, but not the best. I tried the helmets that scored better, but they didn’t fit my head well. The flip-front makes it easier to keep myself from getting quite as overheated and makes it worth the compromise for me. This summer I’ll probably pick up a cooling vest, too.
#4: You are so right about common sense. Unfortunately, I can see a decade from now, when everyone has mandatory helmet laws, and some new far-superior protective technology comes out, and then we’ll have to go back and get all the laws changed because the lawyer-legislators who know jack about motorcycles will have written the laws so that “wearing a helmet” will prohibit “wearing something better than–but not–a helmet.” And it’ll take us another decade for it to be legal to substitute the better tech for helmets.
#9 Helmet and Kevlar vest: That is beautifully paranoid. You are my new hero for the day. I’m going to start wearing my safety glasses from the range when I drive.
bq. I am guessing it was the Darwinian selection comment that offended you.
Nope, squared. I wasn’t offended. Sentiments such as “There, that should get a few of ‘ya going!”, and drive-bys in general, are “deprecated”:http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/003367.php — see Rule # 4 and beyond. I left that statement in place to show why the rest was cut.
“#9 Helmet and Kevlar vest: That is beautifully paranoid. You are my new hero for the day. I’m going to start wearing my safety glasses from the range when I drive.”
I am quite serious (although I have not purchased these items yet). Racecar drivers do wear helmets, and the Kevlar jacket is thin and light just like a normal jacket. No one would even know about the jacket, so only the helmet is conspicuous.
I think if more people saw pictures of what happens when the windshield fragments shred up a face, they might think along the same lines as me.
If 42,000 people die each year in car crashes, why not increase your chances of getting out unscathed by a lot? Particularly if it is only for long, highway road trips where speeds are 70+ mph for hours?
#17: I wasn’t being facetious. Beautifully paranoid is about as high a compliment as I can give. I wish I’d thought of it first. I doubt I’d be able to fit in my car with my motorcycle helmet on, but if the safety glasses can stop or deflect a bullet fragment I bet they will do some good against windshield glass. I would think that your specially-designed car helmet should be lighter-weight to avoid increased neck strain?
The Kevlar is an interesting idea, too, but too expensive for me at this point. Also not sure how much of a value-add that is over the airbags in my car.
#13: Great Harry Hurt quote. I dug up that interview and enjoyed it thoroughly.
#14: I know other stories like yours but left them out for brevity and being only second-hand, but one of my friends has an Army buddy who slid over 100 yards in a German cornfield on the front of his helmet. Had that been his face unprotected, he would have been having a closed-casket funeral.
I ride with full protective gear, including armored pants, even in the summer. I was in Sweden a year ago and every single motorcyclist I saw was wearing full leathers and a full-face helmet. I wonder what they teach over there that our shorts-and-flip-flops-on-a-Hayabusa crowd aren’t hearing. Anytime I think it is too hot to wear my jacket or pants, I just imagine what it must feel like to have the skin scraped off of my spine or blow out one of my knees on the pavement, and then I’m a lot happier to sweat it out.
raven,
How about a compromise? No laws requiring a helmet, but anyone riding without one is required to keep $10,000 in an escrow account in order to reimburse whichever municipality has to pay someone to scrape their brains from the road. That way people can be as foolish as they want, but I don’t have to pay taxes to clean up their foolishness.
Speaking of motorcycle safety, I have to get this one off my chest.
The Washington State Highway Department is going full steam ahead to put cable barriers on all divided highways in the state.
These barriers consist of a series of H section posts about three feet high, 3″ thick, spaced 10′ apart, with three 1″ cables strung between them. The posts have 6″ of steel sticking up past the top cable, and they are generally located close to the shoulder edge.
This is precisely the same type of barrier the FIM is trying to get removed , or padded, in Europe, and any casual glance shows why- they turn what might be a useful escape route onto the median into a deathtrap for bikers.
All I got from the Dept. of Transportation was that they did not have any data showing a problem for bikes, and that the barriers were effective in reducing cross median collisions for cars.
I was not surprised there is little bike data on colliding with the barrier, given any sort of choice, I would hit the car in front of me rather than chance being impaled on the post or sliced in half by the cable.
With some attention to design, it would be possible to come up with a nastier object to hit, but it would take some doing. These make a standard Armco barrier look like a pillow.
“Motorcycle body armor does exist”:http://thekneeslider.com/archives/2005/12/06/motorcycle-body-armor/
I am surprised more people don’t use it.
Thus, I do think that a lighter, cooler version could be worthwhile to use while driving a car at high speeds.
“Here, it says that body armor does protect against car crashes.”:http://www.nleomf.com/media/press/mid2005deaths.htm
“Lastly, here is some sports body armor, that might be a better choice for auto accident protection than a bulletproof vest.”:http://www.planet-knox.com/detail2.aspx?ID=33
Yet more research :
I knew there were 42,000 deaths a year for Motorists. “BUT I did not know that there were as many as 2.9 Million injuries a year!!”:http://www.car-accidents.com/pages/stats.html
That is huge. I did not realize that the injury to death ratio is 70:1. If even just 1 million of the 2.9 million are serious injuries, that is still a 23:1 ratio.
Even more so, helmets and body armor for motorists, at least while driving at highway speeds for extended periods, makes sense. Note that kinetic injury increases as a SQUARE of the velocity, or in other words, the impact at 90 mph is 9 times as much as at 30 mph.
It is one thing to buy a good helmet, but make sure to look for a helmet that fits snuggly and isn’t too big. Unfortunately, I was a first responder to a biker that hit the back of a car and tanked it. The biker had a nice jacket and a nice helmet, but the helmet did not stay on her head during the crash. Sad to say, aside from the blunt head trauma that occurred from the crash, she was also on fire. The helmet would have definitely helped prevent the further damage caused by the fire on her skull…
#13: true, people make poor decisions especially behind the wheel. Unfortunately, in this case it was the biker who drove too fast and forgot to use her brakes and slammed into the rear of a slow moving vehicle. A little common sense would have been more of an asset than all the armor that the biker was wearing.
#20: true: $10,000 in municipalities would be nice, but how about some money for some counseling for children who had to witness it as their mom drove them to dinner. And if you did not pay for the municipalities to do the service, you would be taxed someplace else, such as in the insurance sector. (health, life, auto/bike)
Arai makes helmets for car racing… 500$ or so