[soomerons]

off course you can. And it's been proven over and over. Are you really trying to argue that wearing a helmet is not safer than not wearing one?

Not all car and cyclist collisions are high speed, big impacts, in fact, statistically speaking, most of them in the netherlands are slow speed knocks, cyclist, get bumped, when a car tries to squeeze by, and the cyclist falls and hits their head on the concrete or whatever else is close by.

And then there are all the cyclist against cyclist collisions, someone gets knocked off, and smacks their head against the curb.

But I guess the dutch way of saying "we are dutch and are born on a bicycle and know how to cycle", (and they really actually don't), is easier to say than, looking at the actual stats, and seeing they are wrong.

[aqme28]

What stats are you referring to? The Netherlands has one of the lowest per-km cyclist fatality rates in the world, at least with 2009 numbers[1]. Would be interested to see if that has changed.

[1]: https://blogs-images.forbes.com/niallmccarthy/files/2015/02/...

They also have decently good numbers for traffic fatalities in general: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

[Vinnl]

(Some extra nuance: it is of course true that, ceteris paribus, wearing helmets is strictly safer. It's just that the Dutch stats show that proper infrastructure is even more important, and cyclists are less of a danger to other traffic participants than people in cars, which is why there's no stronger push for making people wear helmets — it might cause them to stop cycling. At an individual level, for sure, wear helmets, but as a society, there are better things to focus on when it comes to traffic safety.)

I don't actually know how strong the evidence is for that.