Riding a bicycle in New York is an exercise in self control. If you can tune out the bad behavior around you, and moderate your own tendency to rush, it’s hard not to enjoy a trip across almost any part of the city. But there are exceptions.

A prickfect storm

In the middle of an uncharacteristically long ride (involving a fruitless ATM quest into the World Financial Center mall), I was coasting down the newly repaved and bike-laned Brooklyn Bridge Boulevard, mulling over the best route to a friend’s apartment for dinner. I was hungry.

In fact this is particularly dangerous intersection.

The light was red at Livingston, a two way street, and the intersection was not clear. As I slowed to a stop, a stereo­typically aggressive cyclist passed me. I have no interest whatever in how other cyclists and pedestrians choose to cross intersections, but this one made a point of emphatically tapping his helmet as he zigged into right-of-way-having traffic. Apparently he was moved by the spirit of safety to mime the helmet gospel to me, the unhelmeted infidel.

While I’ve adapted to never-minding cars parked in bike lanes and pedestrians who do not always look before they leap (as I should—I sometimes do the same), this creature caught me by surprise. Condescension and hypocrisy are unpleasant in any setting, and doubly so when theatrically displayed in tandem. Long after my lecturer had vanished into the distance I was considering what string of obscenities best suited the situation, so much that I forgot to pay attention to the route and followed a familiar-but-wrong one without thinking, arriving at dinner later and grumpier than planned. So let me tell you something about bicycle helmets.

Un pari pascalien

Helmets: they are a wonderful thing for people who are always falling off bicycles! That includes, primarily, sport and competitive road and off-road cyclists, and they will tell you as much. Doubting the need to wear a helmet? They will tell you how many dramatic crashes they have seen and participated in lately. They are basically always crashing! What a fun sport. Anyway, if going over the handlebars is your thing, you should definitely wear a helmet because then your head may not have cuts and bruises to go with the ones on your forearms, elbows, knees, and buttocks. Hooray for fewer injuries.

What about people that don’t really fall that much because they ride slowly and cautiously? Well, the only people that do that are elite city dwellers, so they need a helmet to protect them from crazed middle-class drivers. That is the thinking. The problem is, if your brain is trying to survive a high speed crash with two-ton vehicles, it doesn’t particularly need a thin foam shell; it needs a helmet designed for that purpose. And, considering how many vital organs are not located anywhere near the popular puffed-foam bonnet, it is ridiculous to assume it offers bodily protection in a collision with an automobile.

No one really knows how much protection standard bicycle helmets offer in serious crashes with automobiles. After they break, which they can do in a minor crash, they’re done helping out. If a big crash is like ten small ones, the covered part of the skull may be protected for the first tenth of it.

But! Isn’t it better to just wear one? This is what you will hear ten thousand times from the real cyclists if you dare to question helmet usage, an argument that is as intellectually lazy as they are physically vigorous. It presents the choice as having no or only trivial costs and an unknown degree of benefits, so the decision is easy: do X! We evolved apes perform the same easy circumnavigation of judgment all the time, like when buying insurance for particularly unlikely outcomes (except, when you are going to fake your husband’s death on a train, then it is smart—until you get caught!).

Judgment requires thought-work and doesn’t provide tidy unisex answers, so our society generally avoids it. Pathways to greater public safety that involve any tradeoff, like reducing driving, may as well not exist. Instead, we settle for mitigation that can be characterized as having no unpleasant effect, like adding passive safety features to everything in contact with the road (pedestrians are excused… for now).

Poorly performing truths

You want to talk about bicycling safety products? Here is a wonderful one that no one knows about! It’s called the pedal that doesn’t entrap your foot. Many bicycles come equipped with such pedals, until serious cyclists get ahold of them. Such cyclists are in competition with each other to make their pedals ever harder to escape, and they strive to master the ejection technique and avoid its negative effects on safety. Why do they do this? The all-important cause of performance.

You see, American bicycling doesn’t care about anything but athleticism, competition, and in general, performance. If a kind of toe clip enhances performance but is detrimental to safety, it is just a chopportunity for cyclists to improve their skills. They gain experience with clipless pedals until they can brazenly proclaim zero negative effects, and then these group-riders-and-thinkers encourage relative beginners to use toe-traps and crash their bicycles—all the while insisting that everyone on two wheels wear a helmet regardless. One step forward, and how many backwards? Bicycling Barbie says, it’s easier not to think about it!

Toe clips trade safety for performance, and it’s up to the rider to decide if the initially large safety trade off is worth it. But is it true that helmets trade in nothing (other than—scoff—fashion) for safety? It is not. They trade in convenience, as surely as bulky, garish objects do not vanish from your person when dismounting a bicycle. But the idea of trading any degree of safety for convenience or appearance is ridiculed, while trading safety in bulk for performance is glorified.

Outside of consumable products, there are plenty of ways bike riders often swap safety for intangible goods. Snaking into an active intersection instead of waiting five seconds, as my gracefully condescending helmet professor of yesterday did, is an obvious one. But even a rules acolyte that never crosses on red (they exist, or at least claim to on the internet) may ride faster than is entirely safe, too closely to riders ahead, or even (intentionally and frequently) do both at once in a “pack.” All of this is considered not just acceptable but honorable.

So, in terms of helmets, here is an idea for people that are serious about not just bicycling but also civility: worry about your own heads. And better yet, worry about improving safety infrastructure more than individual safety products. It’s not only rude to lecture adults, it’s stupid when you’ve only thought through a narrow, locally conformist angle.

American cyclists are hardly the authorities on safety that they see themselves as. Our thirty-year culture of bicycling machismo, also known as vehicular cycling, also known as automobile appeasement, has left us with a rather gruesome bouquet: the highest rates for helmet use and bicycle fatalities in the western world.

Raising the question, just what are meathead cyclists trying to protect with their helmets?