The incidence of bike helmet wearing in central London

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srw

It's a bit more complicated than that...
Various people - including me (Why are UK cyclists fixated on helmets) - have been speculating about the incidence of bike helmet use in London and elsewhere. To get beyond anecdote into data I took an opportunity* yesterday of conducting a mini-survey. This is not properly scientific but I think it's indicative.

The survey was conducted in two blocks - firstly a daytime block in approximately the 35 minutes before I went out to lunch and then a peak period survey covering the start of the evening rush hour. The survey covers cyclists travelling north along Gracechurch Street EC3 and turning right into Fenchurch Street, left into King William Street or straight on - because that's what I can see from my office window. My vantage point covered a junction with traffic lights and an ASL, making counting relatively easy.

Each row of the data starts with a time period, then there are two pieces of data - the number of cyclists not wearing a helmet and the number wearing a helmet - and two derived statistics - the total number of cyclists seen and the proportion who had chosen to wear a helmet.

1140 - 1215: 20 - 14 (34) 41%
-----------------------------------
1650 - 1700: 20 - 20 (40) 50%
1700 - 1730: 41 - 67 (108) 62%
1730 - 1745: 18 - 50 (68) 74%
1745 - 1800: 30 - 48 (78) 62%

I'll post another post with some more anecdotal observations and conclusions, but wanted to leave this data post clean.

[edit: thanks to @Afnug for spotting my schoolboy error]
*I was sitting in my office window away from my computer scanning a report that didn't require full brain capacity and needed a fair bit of staring into space for inspiration.
 
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L14M

Über Member
aren't you supposed to be working?
 
OP
OP
srw

srw

It's a bit more complicated than that...
What prompted this survey was noticing in the morning that remarkably few people were wearing helmets and other specialist kit. In fact almost all of the 34 cyclists in that sample were wearing ordinary street clothes, and it's worth reinforcing the point that less than half of the cyclists were wearing helmets. I fully expected that in the evening peak helmet-wearing would become more common, but what surprised me was that the peak incidence was only 3 out of 4 - I'd guesstimated (wrongly) 7 out of 8. There was certainly a very strong correlation between absence of lycra, bare-headedness and flat handlebars - I'd guess that most of the increase in helmet wearing in the evening came from men on road bikes with lycra and racing helmets.

Apart from the roadie brigade there were three noticeable sub-cultures among the cyclists I saw (and I'm getting really unscientific now). There was the obvious corps of couriers - although fewer than I would have expected. Then there was a relatively small but noticeable and determined group of people on cheap and inappropriate bikes (full-sussers from Halfords and the like). Finally, and most interestingly, there was a definite and reasonably large group of young women wearing office clothes and no helmet riding traditional sit-up-and-beg bikes.

Other observations: most people were riding their own bikes, not Boris hire bikes. A fair few Boris riders were kitted out in hi-vis and helmet. Probably more than half of the riders had some element of hi-vis on. More people than I expected were wearing BMX-style solid helmets rather than road-style vented helmets, and I'd guess that that was particularly true of the women. I saw one person with a helmet with a face-guard.

In general red light discipline was pretty good - mostly the motorised traffic respected the ASL and the cyclists respected the red traffic light (roughly speaking, in both cases - I didn't count minor encroachments). And I didn't see anything that looked like a near-miss or a cross word exchanged - everything just worked.

It's worth observing that Gracechurch Street is on the main through route from London Bridge to Liverpool Street and some of the trendier bits of East London, which might have skewed the stats compared with other bits of the capital - but there wasn't obviously a collection of hipsters on fixies.

I'd be interested to see comparisons from elsewhere. The methodology is simple - define a point and just count passing cyclists. It's probably worth being more pedantic about fixed time intervals than I've been here.
 

MikeG

Guru
Location
Suffolk
Judging by the headline I was expecting to write a paragraph about how biased your method and conclusions were, being as you were both a protagonist and a data-collector. In other words, you aren't neutral in this discussion. However, you do appear to have done a reasonable (if tiny) job of sampling, presuming you did it honestly. It is the requirement to assume your honesty in the matter which is the weak-point of the exercise, however. Which isn't to cast aspersions at you: it's just that your figures are unverifiable.

If you are proposing that this be done by a group of interested people dotted all over the country, then could I suggest that fairness could be maintained if people were to actually film in a set location for a set period of time, rather than just count. Post the film here and let others do the counting. In fact, you could suggest some set times during the week, and set periods of time, and have a whole bunch of folk post their videos. Then everyone else could do the counting in a neutral way and post the results, which others would be free to check. This gets around the downside of your figures from today: there is no-one able to vouch for their voracity.
 

Venod

Eh up
Location
Yorkshire
"the number of cyclists wearing a helmet and the number not wearing a helmet"

Haven't you got that sentence the wrong way round ?
 
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OP
srw

srw

It's a bit more complicated than that...
Clearly you're all going to have to trust me - this was a spur-of-the-moment thing. But I think I'm a reasonably trustworthy kind of chap.

[edit]
If nothing else happens as a result of this thread than one or two more people looking out of the window and counting reasonably carefully that'll have been worth it. It's simple and doesn't require a great deal of attention.
 
OP
OP
srw

srw

It's a bit more complicated than that...
"the number of cyclists wearing a helmet and the number not wearing a helmet"

Haven't you got that sentence the wrong way round ?
Yup - sorry. Will correct the OP.
 

theclaud

Openly Marxist
Location
Swansea
Judging by the headline I was expecting to write a paragraph about how biased your method and conclusions were, being as you were both a protagonist and a data-collector. In other words, you aren't neutral in this discussion. However, you do appear to have done a reasonable (if tiny) job of sampling, presuming you did it honestly. It is the requirement to assume your honesty in the matter which is the weak-point of the exercise, however. Which isn't to cast aspersions at you: it's just that your figures are unverifiable.

If you are proposing that this be done by a group of interested people dotted all over the country, then could I suggest that fairness could be maintained if people were to actually film in a set location for a set period of time, rather than just count. Post the film here and let others do the counting. In fact, you could suggest some set times during the week, and set periods of time, and have a whole bunch of folk post their videos. Then everyone else could do the counting in a neutral way and post the results, which others would be free to check. This gets around the downside of your figures from today: there is no-one able to vouch for their voracity.

You're quite right. I wouldn't buy a used car off him.
 
I remember a year, maybe 18 months ago walking west along Euston Road/Marylebone Road towards Baker Street from St Pancras around 9.30 am one morning, and I started counting cyclists and also how many were wearing helmets. I got past 200 in total, and I think it was just under 20% wearing helmets.
 

theclaud

Openly Marxist
Location
Swansea
I remember a year, maybe 18 months ago walking west along Euston Road/Marylebone Road towards Baker Street from St Pancras around 9.30 am one morning, and I started counting cyclists and also how many were wearing helmets. I got past 200 in total, and I think it was just under 20% wearing helmets.
Yebbut you might be well dodgy too.
 

snorri

Legendary Member
I ocasionally do cyclist headgear surveys when on tour by counting up the two groups, helmet and no helmet, and stop counting when the total reaches 100.
This method gives me the percentage of wearers and non wearers in an area, with minimal arithmetical effort on my part.:rolleyes:
 

swansonj

Guru
Entirely anecdotally (and therefore this thread is not the best place to post this) I do think I'm seeing more Boris Bikers with helmets and even in full Lycra than in past years - typically commuters emerging from/returning to Waterloo station having carried their helmet on the train. Increasing acceptance of Boris bikes among the serious cycling brigade? Increasing conformity to racing-derived norms? Or confirmation bias on my part?
 

theclaud

Openly Marxist
Location
Swansea
Entirely anecdotally (and therefore this thread is not the best place to post this) I do think I'm seeing more Boris Bikers with helmets and even in full Lycra than in past years - typically commuters emerging from/returning to Waterloo station having carried their helmet on the train. Increasing acceptance of Boris bikes among the serious cycling brigade? Increasing conformity to racing-derived norms? Or confirmation bias on my part?

You might be a pathological liar for all we know.
 
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