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We've been through this one time already haven't we.

Ali has a very deep insight into this issue. He thought about it a lot when it first surfaced.

My perspective has changed a lot since I got to Vietnam. People are really stupid. Nobody wore helmets to drive motorbikes until they made it illegal and started to fine people. In towns where the police are a bit relaxed nobody wears helmets. Standards for helmets here are pretty low - some are just plastic baseball caps that don't protect people. I've seen a few people die - One guy had no helmet and smashed his head like a watermelon, the other didn't have the strap done up and it just flew off of his head - He didn't have any visible injuries but he died really quickly too - he was really old. I've seen so many accidents I can't recall all of them and I see new whitelines on the roads everyday.

Despite the frequency of accidents people here generally only put helmets on their head so they don't have to pay money to the police but it's up to people smarter than them to protect them from their own stupidity. There's a lack of education here and there appears to be in Australia. If people think that they don't need to wear helmets then they lack education. Flatland isn't really cycling is it? Cycling requires a helmet.

Back to Vietnam for a further point. Wing mirrors are compulsory in Vietnam but the police here don't bother upholding that law. So, everybody in my town removes them because they 'look ugly'. In the city everybody has wing mirrors but nobody looks at them and a lot of people point them at the ground because 'light shines in their faces'. People will live in their own realms of stupidity unless they are painstakingly herded to safety.

People need to be fined if they don't wear helmets and helmets needed to be routinely and randomly checked to see if they conform to some kind of safety standard. It's the only way. If you don't wear a helmet you do endanger other people. Nobody wants to see a head burst open like a watermelon. Nobody wants their kids to see that.

I think that cops will only issue helmet fines to BMXers if they're in the road - are being dicks - the cops are being dicks - or - some kinds of targets are set for fines or there is a crackdown on helmet use. . . When I see cops in Oz I always stop riding until they pass. I think that shows them a degree of respect that they are generally happy with. They know what we're doing but they need to do their jobs too.

This is an outdated topic. Just suck it up and wear a helmet, it's really no big deal.