EDIT: Don’t bother reporting people criticizing others for not wearing a helmet. It’s not victim blaming, just like criticizing someone for not wearing a seatbelt isn’t victim blaming.
Wear your helmets people: Of course nobody deserves to get hit by a car but the reality is people are getting hit by cars.
Speed does not – in and of itself – somehow create more collisions. What makes a collision is a difference of relative speed.
From my list earlier, absolute speed would tend to exacerbate scenarios 1, 2, 4, and 6. But would make little difference to scenario 3, and scenario 5 would depend on the speeds of other bicyclists. My analysis points out that if scenario 3 is what has been drastically increasing in the past decade – which is corroborated by the Oregon study linked earlier – then no, speed is pretty much irrelevant. Being struck by a motor vehicle driver making a turn is going to be bad, no matter what speed the bicycle, ebike, or motorcycle was going.
What I cannot show – nor can anyone show otherwise – is the prevalence of those scenarios in proportion to overall collisions. We simply have insufficient data, which should be a call to action for better information from collision investigations.
But again, just because helmets are not useful in one situation does not mean that they are worthless in all. They are very helpful in a subset of situations and should be worn for those situations.
Who was arguing that helmets are worthless? I don’t see that thread.