The woman in the tight white top and even tighter black trousers teeters out of an upmarket clothes shop on very high heels and glances balefully at a lowering grey sky. It's raining. She puts up a small white umbrella, unlocks her bike, wipes the saddle and pushes off down the street when her mobile rings. She extricates it from a tight breast pocket, clicks and begins a conversation. The hand that holds the umbrella is doing the (wobbly) steering. You've never seen so many road safety no-nos in your life. But hey! Welcome to Amsterdam!

Cyclists rule in this city. Take a population of 780,000. Reckon that 75% of them over the age of 12 owns a bike, and that over half of them take a spin every day. Then look, in amazement, at the kit they wear (or rather, the kit they don't wear). No lurid jackets or flashing lights. No protective pads, gloves or twiddly bits. And no helmets, either. Nobody wears a helmet.

The mums winding along Prinsengracht, one baby strapped into a chair on the handlebars, another squashed in behind, has no helmet (and no brakes either). The dad with the toddler squatting in a rickety wooden box up front eating a doughnut has no helmet. The hundreds of kids racing around Leidseplein wouldn't dream of wearing a helmet. But nobody cares.

Why should they? Safety comes in less obvious ways. All those millions of rides a year involve only six or seven deaths. Amsterdam works hard at ensuring that, to be sure. Lots of investment in cycle lanes, special traffic lights, intensive education et al. And simple physical things – like streets that heavy goods vehicles and bendy buses can't reach – help, too. Yet still the lack of protective kit is amazing.

If I go out in my London park this morning I'll see small children on small bikes wearing huge pink helmets whilst mum trots anxiously in their wake. If I raise the question in America, I'll be sonorously informed that 60% of cycling deaths stem from head injuries and that researchers say a properly fitted helmet saves a life in between 74% and 85% of cases. It's the most conventional problem and response going. See danger? Fear danger? Go out and buy something to make it seem less.

But Amsterdam takes an exactly opposite stance. Who wants to lug heavy helmets between office and home? Who needs to put on modern body armour to take a bike ride? Helmets and the rest don't increase safety overall. In practical terms, they shrink cycle use – and the more it shrinks, the more people (walking, driving) get killed. In short, doing the safe thing is the stupid, unsafe thing. Far, far better to create an easy-going environment where ladies in tight trousers holding umbrellas can wobble down Hooftstraat unmolested. Far better to plonk all human life in a big picture frame.

For statistics don't tell every story (indeed, statistics – like those ones about helmets saving lives – usually tell a variety of conflicting stories). How many street cameras equal safety from crime? You'd be hard put to make sense of the correlations. When the western world embraces the whole concept of "security", ringing airports with steel and glum bureaucracies ordering you to take your shoes off, is that prudence or the whole, costly promise of safety turned grotesque? If the most quoted reason why more Britons (and Americans) don't go out on a bike is fear of getting knocked off it, then why don't we tackle the spectre of fear itself?

There is no life without death. Take one kid with an iPod almost pushing me into the canal. But at least we've both got a life. And at least, taking one thing with another, using context as well as hysteria, we can try to enjoy it.