Riding w/o a helmet

[Pax]

Trust me, I have no desire to impose it on others, just like the people who don't use a seatbelt or ride their motorcycle without a helmet. My next door neighbor let's her 5 year old ride both motorized and pedal vehicles without one and he's a little daredevil, but I don't say anything because that's their business. It's not worth it to me, but it's not my or my family's health that's at risk.

Took me a long time get to this point but I'm there, that pithy phrase "not my circus, not my monkeys" reminds me that I need to keep my sights on my own business, I don't have enough of an attention span to spread it around.

[Crankin]

I can honestly say that when it comes to kids, I will never "get there." I don't say anything to roadies who are helmet-less, but that is extremely rare in these parts. It's the newbie recreational types that seem to bother me. While commenting to adults is not the thing I always do, I'd be lying if I said I've never done it. I don't sit around and think/worry about this stuff, but when I see it, I do get upset.
Yeah, I know the stuff about the nanny state, etc. Perhaps that's why I like living in Massachusetts.

[emily_in_nc]

I hate seeing people riding without helmets in the US, kids or adults, path or road. And I absolutely always wear one here -- would feel naked without one. But interestingly, in Belize, where literally NO ONE wore a helmet, it didn't bother me because it was just the cultural norm. I admit that I also did not wear a helmet there. There are few vehicles (mostly other bikes and golf carts), and because of bad roads, speeds are slow. Riding a beach cruiser on the sandy beach path and even on the bumpy road, I never worried about not wearing a helmet and never had a problem. I did fall a couple of times in the sand (slow speed spin out type falls), but never hit my head. I know many of you here would not have even taken that much of a chance, but culturally, being from the US, we were already "different" enough, that I just didn't care to stand out even further from the local crowd. When in Rome, I guess...

[lph]

Yeah, that was part of my point, Emily, that how we behave is affected both by the real risk (traffic vs no traffic, slow vs fast) but also by the culture component. In a culture where "real cyclists " wear helmets, wearing one signals that you probably are aware of other things, like visibility. Or vice versa, not wearing one signals to me someone who doesn't care. I usually don't get to watch them long enough to tell if they're actually running real risks or not. I'm viewed by everyone I know as a dedicated cyclist, that is reason enough to not skip the helmet even if it's just for pedalling slowly uphill the half a mile on a cycle path from the grocery store.

[PamNY]

In the OP's situation, I probably would have made exactly the same choice. As others have pointed out, that's not entirely logical -- you can certainly have a serious crash without cars around. But it "seems" safer to be away from cars.

I occasionally take off my helmet if I'm cycling very slowly in a park and looking for birds, but other than that I always wear one. I keep the helmet on the bike, so forgetting it is less likely.

I see a lot of people cycling without helmets; it would never occur to me to say something to them. Recently I saw someone cycling with a helmet-less (and very young) infant in a backpack. I found that shocking and upsetting. I hope they weren't going very far, and I hope they got there safely.