I occasionally forget my helmet - I always go back and get it when I realize.

If I wasn't a believer in helmets, I definitely am after biking with TxDoc last week... It was pouring rain, we were riding skinny road slicks (700x23) on Baltimore roads with a ton of potholes and railroad tracks.

I'm not entirely certain how I fell, I know, we were riding pretty slowly because it was raining and we were going over some railroad tracks that diagonally cut across the road and there was a ton of potholes - something caught my front wheel and I started to fall, but I managed to recover from that fall, but something caught my front wheel and skidded it out the other way... Suddenly I was on the ground (flash of white light when my head hit)...

So I smashed my helmet up and got 2 small scratches on my ankle (I still don't get how I fell like that)... but I didn't even have a headache afterwards, despite the dents in the outside of the helmet and the foam being broken on the inside. I said something like "at least I don't road rash" and TxDoc said something like "most people would prefer that to hitting their head" and looked at me like I was nuts.

I'm not sure the argument that kids have slower reaction times matters - because most of the time when I've fallen, I've had no time to react more quickly... and my reaction time has little to do with whether or not a car hits me often.

I almost hit a cyclist today and was really annoyed. He had no helmet on and headphones on. It was going through a city center with 2 lanes in either direction. He was in the outside lane, I was in the inside one... andthe light changed and we all stopped... He decided to dash in front of me, cutting me off and then got into the inner lane of the opposite lanes of traffic (despite cars coming towards him in that direction)... Where he rode up to the front of the line of traffic and jumped back into the front of the cars waiting at the red light...

It wasn't real smart of him.