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news
Maisie Godden-hall incident (via BBC).jpgGirl who went under car after braking too hard and going over handlebars now campaigning to make helmets compulsory
The BBC reports on a 12-year-old girl who is campaigning for there to be a mandatory cycle helmet law after she was told by doctors that hers had saved her life. Maisie Godden-Hall was riding to school more quickly than usual after struggling to find her helmet when she went over her handlebars and under a car.
Speaking to the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Air Ambulance website, Maisie recalled the events leading up to the incident on November 3, 2016.
“On the morning of my accident I got ready for school as usual, but I was running a bit late as I couldn’t remember where I’d put my cycle helmet. It was a strict rule that I wasn’t allowed to cycle without it, and by the time I did find it, it was later than usual.
“I was cycling my regular route, which involved using the crossings and cycling on the pavement. There is a junction on my route where I generally move into the bus lane, as there is a wall that blocks the view for drivers. I was travelling quite fast to make up some time, but I realised that a car at the junction was moving out and I needed to brake hard. I don’t remember much about the next few minutes, only what people have told me, as it all happened so fast.
“As I braked, my bike stopped, but I didn’t. I flew over the handlebars of my bike and landed in front of the car. The driver didn’t see me and, spotting a gap in the traffic, moved forward over me. Her son was sitting in the passenger seat and saw me fall so it didn’t take long for her to realise that something had happened.”
Maisie sustained three breaks in her pelvis, a broken collarbone, major facial injuries and the loss of seven teeth.
She stayed in hospital until November 28 and by the time she left was allowed to sit in a wheelchair for one hour, twice a day. By Christmas she was on crutches and she has now recovered sufficiently that she is back doing gymnastics.
Having been told that without her helmet she would probably have died, Maisie said: “I know I am only 11 years old, but I really want to use what happened to me to promote the cause for wearing cycle helmets; I think it should be law.”
Campaigners including Cycling UK say that it should be up to individuals to decide whether or not to wear a cycle helmet, often citing Australia as an example of a country that made them mandatory only to see levels of cycling plummet.
Opponents say that legislation deters people from riding a bike and therefore has an overall negative effect on public health.
British Cycling policy advisor Chris Boardman has previously been critical of the perennial debate, saying: “It’s not even in the top 10 of things you need to do to keep cycling safe or more widely, save the most lives.”
Responding to a link to the BBC article by Hampshire Roads Policing which stressed the importance of wearing a helmet, he tweeted:
The girl was ran over by a car and had her pelvis crushed....and this what you take from it? Wow https://t.co/XameeHMdm0
— Chris Boardman (@Chris_Boardman) December 15, 2017
Alex has written for more cricket publications than the rest of the road.cc team combined. Despite the apparent evidence of this picture, he doesn't especially like cake.
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116 comments
I don't think this example reinforces the point you're trying to make, unless you think we should be evolving polystyrene lids to protect us from hurtling down pavements and somersaulting into traffic?
Not really sure you understand natural selection.
Must be time for someone to pop up a helpful graph to help this discussion along?
or maybe a video?
a graphic?
"“On the morning of my accident I got ready for school as usual, but I was running a bit late as I couldn’t remember where I’d put my cycle helmet. It was a strict rule that I wasn’t allowed to cycle without it, and by the time I did find it, it was later than usual. "
And there we have the real problem, she was in a rush.
Ban watches and clocks and timetables and time!
Great, yet another helmet related feature to argue about.
Am waiting to read about what brakes she had, after all if she had disc brakes, then perhaps they were too powerful for her ability, so perhaps children should have quaint rim brakes...
Hey! My bike has rim brakes; nothing wrong with rim brakes...
I have one bike with each and my kids have had bikes with each. From my experience the differential between the two brake types was significantly greater on my kids bikes than between mine. Fully appreciate that this is a tiny sample group, but it is clear from her account that the bike stopped much quicker than she anticipated, which gets me wondering.
But aren't disc brakes supposed to offer you wonderful modulation over rim brakes, and yet when in a panic situation, (which we see with the pros as well when they lock up and lose traction/steering ability) whether it's discs or rim brakes it makes jack all difference if there's enough power to stop someone in their tracks and high side it.
Disc brakes for kids is IMHO not a great idea and certainly not a solution to a problem that wasn't there in the first place.
Is there any proof that it saved her life? Nope.
Tired of all these total rubbish claims about cycle safety. Do a proper scientific test, publish a peer reviewed journal, then I'll notice.
In the mean time, I'll continue to ride wearing a helmet, safe in the knowledge that if a lorry driver doesn't bother to indicate and/or use their mirrors, I'll still be very squished regardless of the helmet.
Easy, now... graphs might happen.
> as there is a wall that blocks the view for drivers
That's the issue here - poor junction design. That and a motorist not paying attention. The helmet is irrelevant and whoever told her it saved her life is ignorant.
I sent a complaint to the BBC via their website regarding this video - I consider that it is lazy journalism, as at no point are the contentions of the child, the parent, or the 'expert' adults ever questioned.
How can they state so categorically that the child, who ended up with a car on top of her, would have died but for her plastic hat? What possible evidence do they have for that, or for suggesting that this incident (awful and frightening though it must have been for the girl and for her parent) supports compulsory helmets?
There seems to be an institutional bias in the media about cycle helmets, completely unjustified by the available 'efficacy' data, or tempered by the international evidence that making helmets compulsory reduces cycle use. Given the health and environmental benefits of cycling, that's verging on negligence in my opinion.
I do hope the girl makes a complete recovery, continues to ride her bike, and remains free to make a personal choice about wearing a helmet.
It's worse than lazy - it's deliberately coming to a flawed conclusion based on the BBC's anti-cycling agenda.
She wasn't free to make a personal choice about wearing a helmet and I think wearing that her that helmet most likely caused the incident. That's the complete opposite of what the BBC is reporting.
In what way did this helmet prevent which injuries that would have resulted in her death? The uninformed opinion of the doctor (or rather what the girl relates the doctor told her) is no evidence.
Let's see her helmet. Was it's polystyrene foam crushed flat in an area that covered a critical part of her head? If not, the helmet did nothing to mitigate head injuries.
Cycling helmets are flimsy things. It doesn't take much of a blow to make them look wrecked. For them to have actually absorbed any significant force (of the mere 7 Newtons they are build to absorb, at best) the polystyrene must go from fully expanded to fully crushed. A cracked shell and/or a broken part does not mean that the helmet protected the head in any significamt way.
Stories like this also have that unintended consequence of making wearers over-confident which increases their risk appetite.
These are probably the main reasons that helmet wearers statistically suffer more head injuries than non-wearers. Helmets protect very little; they make wearers believe they are immune from harm ("It'll save my life").
As to the opinion that people refuse to wear them because they are "not cool".... In fact, the "coolest" dogma-riding MAMILs and similar would not be seen dead without a helmet, to go with all their other pretend-I'm-a-professional pose. I never a met a helmet wearer yet who knew anything about the testing regime (or lack of it) for cycling helmets - what they can and can't actually protect from. They wear one because everyone else does; and they read an advert about how Cav or Bertie wears one.
Why are the facts that helmets provide little protection and induce over-confidence never mentioned in the "a helmet saved my life" anecdotal news blurbs? Perhaps there is a PR thing going on somewhere, paid for by helmet purveyors? Those things must be highly profitable! £100 or more for a bit of plastic that probably costs a few pence to make. As we know, 95% of so-called news these days is in fact PR blurb uncritically reiterated by so called news sources because it's a lot easier than doing real journalism.
How did this particular story emerge into the BBC News and elsewhere, eh?
Cugel the sceptical.
Shamefully I actually Googled it while I had an argument with one of my brothers' about wearing one.
His son and a few other people I know told me to wear one because they know I will try stupid things to emulate the local teenagers....
I don' t think that helmets should be compulsory, however a proper helmet does provide protection, not the very vented plastic covered Polystyrene Foam crap, which are I know 1st hand is weaker and often doesn't protect enough of the head!
I had tooth lose and expensive dental repair from a crash, and immediately realised that any helmet without chin protection cannot protect the jaw, so only look for full-face helmets now!
I discovered the inferiority of plastic skin covered Polystyrene Foam helmets compared to tougher helmets:
* I had two MET Parachutes, a slightly tougher MTB-shape plasic-covered Polystyrene Foam helmet, with hard plastic chin guard, with loads of annoying wind noise, no insect screens, annoying securing, and needed a rain cover during wet weather; on crashing , both were mostly-cracked complete-write-offs, with localised shell deformation and compression, and minor stunning; the 2nd ones chin guard protected my chin, but cut my chin. Never buying them again!
* I've had two Urge down-o-matic helmets, with a Fibreglass shell and padding, insect screens, easy securing; the 1st only had about a 1mm of the chin guard scrapped off despite it being grated for about 1 to 2m at higher speed, no cracks, no stunning, and no damage to my head/face, but replaced anyway. They don't need a rain cover in wet or cold weather either.
I don't wear a helmet all the time, but do for commuting, steep gradiants, or longer distances.
Hold on a second - she was "forced" to wear a helmet (due to a "strict rule" presumably from an over-reaching headteacher). It sounds like she was running late due to not being able to find the helmet and so was travelling faster than she normally does. She then attempted to brake to avoid an incident and instead went over the handlebars.
To my mind, this sounds like the requirement to wear a helmet was a key reason that she was travelling at an unsafe speed (as evidenced by not being able to emergency brake successfully) and thus is one of the causes of her crash. The other main cause would be the driver of the car not seeing and reacting to her which prompted her to emergency brake.
So, a girl has a major injury, in part due to being required to wear a helmet, and now wants everyone to be required to wear a helmet!
I suspect that if she hadn't been forced to wear a helmet, she would have instead left a bit earlier and not been rushing. She may then have been more cautious (due to not wearing a helmet) and not got into the panic situation at all.
I think she's being used to promote an agenda.
So she crashed because she was hurrying due to finding her helmet? No helmet, no crash. Ban helmets.
She hit a parked car. Ban parked cars.
She crashed as she's shit on her brakes, ban brakes?
Or more likely ban children from cycling until they do a bikeability course so they learn how to brake in an emergency, and know not to suddenly appear from behind parked cars when other road traffic can't see them.
Here is a chance for a real journalist to do some proper journalisming.
The circumstances of the crash seem to have contributed to it's occurence via a number of factors. (Surprise - there isn't just a single factor to blame - real life, eh). The child seems to have been inept at cycling in a number of ways, resulting in bad braking, whilst riding in a place and a fashion that was likely to require emergency braking. So ....
A journalist might ask the question: how and why is such a child (and this one in particular) so inept that she places herself into potentially lethal danger? Without wishing to put words in the mouth of this hypothetical journalist, one might suggest that consideration be given to the possibility that the cultural regime in which she took up cycling has eschewed some useful training & education about cycling in favour of a magic bullet (the helmet) plus some wishful thunks (I wish nothing bad to happen so it won't).
Step forward parents and educational establishment, not to mention law makers and others who might regulate the use of bicycles in a fashion that is actually of utility to riders rather than fodder for creating pariahs and scapegoats for the gutter press to chew on.
And how about the notion that motor cars doing 10mph in urban environments might be much more likely to stop before they run over understandably inept children than are those doing a (legal) 30mph or the more common (illegal) 37mph?
Cugel, on the lookout for fundamental causes as opposed to made-up-stuff.
Ban front brakes perhaps
ban pelvises!
It’s obviously sad that a young girl has been seriously injured in this manner and it could well be that the helmet saved her life. Regardless this is an individual instance and policy must be based on evidence not anecdote, however emotive.
The paramedics told me that my accident would probably have been a fatality if I hadn't been wearing my helmet. Despite the fact that my head hadn't hit anything - all the impact being taken on my thigh, which broke. It's hard to understand how wearing a helmet helped me at all (save for providing a sort of cushion for my head as I lay in the road waiting for the ambulance.
Its probable that they were making poorly-informed guesses as to how my accident had occurred, but as it been moved a few metres from whe it actually happened (the middle of the road) to the gutter (near a big, solid wall) they were putting two and two together to make eight.
Best to let the medics deal with medical things, and allow statisticians and safety experts to make the case for (or actually against) mandatory helmet use.
"I chose to do something, so you should be forced to do the same thing."
Sorry, no.
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