This spring, when Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger collided with a car that turned left in front of him, breaking his face and causing a concussion, it triggered a media uproar about the need for helmet laws. Few remarked on the irony or hypocrisy of the situation, the fact that the soapboxes came out when a sports star merely sustained recoverable injuries, but not when dozens of other riders in the same state died because they weren't wearing helmets. The life and death of Joe Rider apparently doesn't much interest editors and readers of general-interest publications, but the chance that a star quarterback might not be fit for football season is a big deal, one that should be prevented with helmet laws or even banning all players from riding motorcycles, as some teams do.
The press devoted much less attention to the revelation that Roethlisberger, who had previously said he didn't believe he needed a helmet because he rode carefully, didn't even have a license. Riding without a license isn't smart. In fact, unlicensed riders are more likely to crash than those who get properly licensed. In Pennsylvania, you have to be licensed before you can ride without a helmet. So not only is riding without a license not smart, it's also breaking the law. One witness to the accident reportedly said the quarterback seemed to be looking somewhere other than at the car that was preparing to turn left, which also doesn't sound very wise.
No one paid much attention to the guy who said that even if there had been a helmet law and Roethlisberger had been wearing a helmet as a result, it might not have made a lot of difference. You should note it, however, because the guy who said that was Harry Hurt, the lead author of Motorcycle Accident Cause Factors and Identification of Countermeasures (a.k.a. the Hurt Report), which 25 years later is still the most comprehensive study of motorcycle crashes in America. Hurt also runs the Head Protection Research Laboratory (www.hprl.org), which tests and studies helmet performance and motorcycle accidents.
In a letter to a Pasadena, California, newspaper, Hurt commented that the Roethlisberger crash was not an unusual one in terms of the events that caused it, the way the rider went facefirst into the car's relatively soft windshield (colliding with the front of the roof or one of its pillars could have resulted in much more severe brain injuries), and the injuries sustained by the rider. Hurt went on to say that merely complying with a law that required motorcyclists to wear a helmet wouldn't necessarily have made a difference. Unless Roethlisberger had worn a full-coverage helmet with an EPS chin bar, his uncovered face would still have been susceptible to the same sort of injuries. In such face-first impacts, wearing a helmet with a chin bar can also save your life by keeping facial bones from being pushed into your brain.
Nonetheless, open-face helmets offer some real comfort advantages over the full-face helmets I and the rest of this magazine's editors favor. They tend to be slightly lighter than full-face-coverage hats. Oddly, they are sometimes quieter than full-coverage models. Because it's exposed to the world, your face cools off better on a hot day. Of course, that also exposes it to bugs, gravel, and rain. I don't even like to think about being caught in a hailstorm with an open-face lid or what an errant bird could do.
I bought my first full-face helmet back in1968, when Bell put the first one, the Star, into production. (Yeah, it was orange too.) It took me a few days to adjust, but then I used it for a three-month ride through Mexico. That first Star was a work in progress back then, mostly because of the eyeport. It was substantially smaller than the eyeports on today's full-coverage shells, and the faceshield was fixed inside the molding of the eyeport. You couldn't flip it up for cooling or to put on sunglasses. If you wanted to use a dark shield, you had to pry out the clear shield and coax the tinted one into the eyeport's molding. But there was EPS foam (the material that actually absorbs the energy of an impact) all the way around your head and on the chin bar. I was very pleased to have it when a bird smashed into the top of my chin bar at about 60 mph.
By the time we returned from the ride through Mexico, wearing an open-face helmet made me feel unprotected. I wore one around the block once after that and never went back. (Actually, that's not true. I sometimes wear an open-face motorcycle helmet while riding my bicycle.) However, the flip-up-shield kit that was soon available was a real advance, and the second Star I owned had a larger eyeport, so my peripheral vision was no longer limited.
Folks who have never really spent time in one imagine that full-face helmets create all sorts of problems, like muting the world around you so you can't hear other traffic or limiting your view. There is some truth to the concern about limiting vision, but just vertically. On a cruiser with tank-top instruments, the chin bar sometimes blocks your view, so you have to tilt your head forward slightly to read them. It's not enough to block your view of the road ahead, though. In some helmets, I can't even see both sides of the eyeport with my eyeballs at full-lock, so peripheral vision is not compromised. While a helmet does muffle external sounds some, that's generally a good thing, since most of the ambient noise is just that, noise. It's the sound of your engine, drivetrain, exhaust and most of all the wind passing your head. The sounds that you need to hear-the tire or engine sounds of approaching vehicles, emergency sirens, the voices of pedestrians, a change in your bike's drivetrain, something falling off the bike-have to be picked out from the general din, and that's easier when the ambient noise is knocked back a bit. In particular, a properly designed helmet shell can make your passage through the wind smoother and therefore reduce the wind's roar compared with your bare head, which is not as streamlined. Riding without a helmet or other ear protection will quickly cost you hearing capacity from the effects of wind noise. If you have a loud exhaust, the loss will happen even faster.