Go to New York City and you’ll see the inconceivable:

Thousands of people riding bikes in the thickest of traffic, without helmets. In the Land Of The Free, they have the right to bare heads.

But then, you can see the same thing in Paris, London, Dublin, Barcelona, Tel Aviv ... I could go on. All those cities have successful bike-share programs.

Their common denominator:

They waived or rescinded laws requiring helmets for cyclists — at least, for adult cyclists. (Many cities with bike-sharing programs still require children to wear helmets.)

They did so to increase the participation rates of their programs, because they found that the mandatory use of helmets dampened participation.

Locals found it too inconvenient to carry a helmet, or balked at the idea of sharing one.

Helmet laws were also a barrier to the tourist trade, which constitutes a significant portion of bike-sharing programs in cities like New York and Paris. (Or could be for a city that purports to be a tourist destination, as Vancouver does.)

Meanwhile, cities that continued to insist on mandatory helmet use found their bike-sharing programs stalling or shrinking for lack of use. Both Melbourne and Brisbane found their use rates for their bike-share programs to be half of target projections, despite the fact that the Victoria state government offered free helmet sharing.

The argument for helmet use rests on safety and injury prevention, but at least one study found that mandatory laws and increased mass use of helmets have had no discernible effect on reducing the number of cycling injuries and fatalities in Canada.

Jessica Dennis, a researcher with the University of Toronto’s school of public health, could find no statistical link between mandatory helmet use and reduced hospital admissions for cycling injuries.

Instead, Dennis suggested, there was more to making cyclists safe than just wearing headgear. Driver education, moral suasion, more cyclists on the road (there being safety in numbers) and, most especially, the increased use of bike lanes all had an effect on cycling safety.

“I think the helmet law was an interesting experiment,” said University of B.C. Prof. Kay Teschke, of the school of population and public health, “(but) I don’t think it’s had the public health benefit we thought it would have. And I think continuing to emphasize helmets as a bike-safety method by the medical health professions and my profession is an abrogation of responsibility.”

Teschke believes that when it comes to bike safety, we have it exactly backwards — that helmet laws are a distraction and don’t increase the sense of safety for cyclists. On the contrary, she believes, they may increase the sense of danger cyclists face in traffic.

It’s a mistake, Teschke said, to consider helmets a “preventive measure.” Rather, she said, they are an “injury-mitigation measure” after the fact, and do nothing in the way of prevention.

“In public health, we have primary prevention — preventing injury or disease from happening in the first place. And if you just protect from serious head injury when you’re in a crash rather than preventing a crash, that (cyclist) who has a serious head injury, in about 77 per cent of the cases, also has other serious injuries. So, how is that protecting someone?

“It’s a complete abrogation of responsibility for preventing the injury from happening in the first place. That’s what we need to be doing, and it infuriates me that we’ve been focusing on something that in most public health professions we wouldn’t be doing. You know, we advocate smoking cessation: we don’t advocate treatment of lung cancer once you’ve got it. It’s just ridiculous.”

As for the number of head injuries, Teschke points out, they are much, much higher among motorists. Yet the public would find the idea of mandatory helmet laws for use in an automobile an unnecessary infringement on their personal freedom, if not ridiculous.

Teschke isn’t against helmet use — she is a cyclist herself — but she believes the answer to cycling safety and, just as importantly, increasing the sense of safety, isn’t mandatory helmet use, but rather in the construction of more bike lanes, preferably dedicated and separated bike lanes.

To which, of course, there will be absolutely no public objection.

pmcmartin@vancouversun.com

Click here to report a typo or visit vancouversun.com/typo.

Is there more to this story? We'd like to hear from you about this or any other stories you think we should know about. CLICK HERE or go to vancouversun.com/moretothestory