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Edinburgh has been identified by the Transport Research Laboratory [1] as being the city with the highest proportion of cyclists who wear helmets in Great Britain. Informal observation shows summer wearing rates to be in the 30-40% band, rising to 60-70% for commuters in winter. It is therefore an appropriate location to assess whether the large rise in helmet use in recent years has influenced cyclist casualties.
Pedestrians and cyclists follow very well matched injury trends, as the graphs below of cyclist and pedestrian casualties in Edinburgh show. As cyclist casualties are rarely older than 65 years, these have been omitted from the pedestrian data.
In both graphs there is a high degree of correlation between cyclist and pedestrian injuries, and especially so for adults. Pedestrians suffer higher severities of injury than cyclists, both for children and for adults. For child casualties the data are more variable because the numbers involved are low.
During the era before helmets were in common use, say before 1993, the injury trends of both cyclists and pedestrians improved in nearly identical patterns. That is, although the absolute changes in injuries are large, the relationship between cyclists and pedestrians is pretty constant. If we divide the cyclist data by the pedestrian data, we'd get a pretty flat relationship. This is where we might be able to observe a helmet effect if one exists.
After 1993, helmets became progressively more common in Edinburgh, reaching the quite significant levels of use seen today. Can we see any evidence that cyclists have 'got ahead' of pedestrians in these years? It does not look like it. If anything, cyclists appear to be worse off relative to pedestrians. The matter becomes clearer if we divide cyclists by pedestrians as described above to see the relative trends:
For adult cyclists, there is a discernible decline in relative injuries during the 1980s, which flattens out after the early 1990s, with no further improvement. There may even have been a slight decline. The history for children is again more erratic because of the small data number, but there is a decline apparent from about 1995. That is, child cyclist injuries became worse relative to pedestrian injuries after 1995.
From these real world results, it would be hard to conclude that the use of helmets by Edinburgh cyclists has had any beneficial impact on improving reported injury trends. For adults there was no improvement during the time of growth in helmet use — rather, previous improvement came to an end — whilst for children there was a deterioration for cyclists.
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References
[1] Bryan-Brown K, Christie N. Cycle helmet wearing in 1999. TRL, Report 487.
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