Bike helmet

Kids aren’t the only ones who flout bike safety because helmets just aren’t cool. Plenty of grownups go sans helmet, too, which is just downright dangerous, According to the Snell Memorial Foundation, a non-for-profit dedicated to promoting helmet safety, “Every year the estimated number of bicycling head injuries requiring hospitalization exceeds the total of all the head injury cases related to baseball, football, skateboards, kick scooters, horseback riding, snowboarding, ice hockey, in-line skating and lacrosse.”  To illustrate with numbers, in 2015 45,000 bicyclists were injured in traffic-related accidents, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. Those are some strong arguments for wearing a helmet–no matter what age you are.

If you are still aren’t convinced enough to add a helmet to your cycling routine, consider Thousand Bike Helmets. For those who think most bike helmets look like props for a bad sci-fi movie from the 1980s, Thousand claims to make cool and stylish bike helmets. Their mission is actually threefold: help curb the impact of bike accidents, promote active and community living, and make quality gear without causing unnecessary harm to the planet.

While the designs are super cool, they also feature some important attributes as well. The helmets are CPSC (Consumer Product Safety Commission) and CE (Conformité Européene) certified. For those concerned about having to carry around a bike helmet all day, Thousand helmets also come with a secret poplock that allows riders to leave helmets behind. The straps are made with vegan leather, a micro-fiber material made with the planet and animals in mind. And for anyone who hates those clip fasteners, Thousand helmets have a magnetic fastener that is pinch-free.

“We like to call our customers urban explorers; they want a helmet that  matches their lifestyle, ” says Thousand founder Gloria Hwang.

The special design features are all well and good, you are thinking, but what about the look of the helmets? Here are some of our favorite designs.

Bike Helmet Designs from Thousand Bike Helmets

1. Speedway Creme

One part Herbie the Lovebug and one part Steve McQueen. We love this retro-inspired helmet with racing stripes.

2. Nordic Wood

From the Epoch Collection, this helmet combines faux bois style with lightweight safety. What could be better?

3. Stay Gold

From the Premium Collection–vintage moto meets modern minimal.

4. Heritage Collection

A basic, ‘matches everything’ helmet available in black, white, and navy.

5. Willowbrook Mint

Another color from the Epoch Collection.

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The post This Company Makes Bike Helmets So Chic (and Eco) You’ll Want to Sell Your Car and Bike Everywhere appeared first on EcoSalon.

The MindRider Helmet can read your mind as you bike to work. That’s right–with the help of an EEG sensor that displays your stress levels, it tells you how your mind is reacting to your commute.

A sensor translates your mind’s engagement but lighting up from green to red and the results are linked up with your smartphone so you can see them on your MindRider app after you bike to work.

The app shows you red hotspots, where you’re most focused and when you’re the most relaxed via green “sweet spots” when you bike to work. It can give you all sorts of insights like where you need better bike lanes and where pot holes, tractor trailers, and road construction stressed you out in your morning commute.

“It indicates your mental state by flashing a visual vocabulary of traffic lights,” says MindRider inventor Arlene Ducao, reported in Wired. “Green is low stress, red is high stress and blinking lights indicate panic.”

The first MindRider was invented at MIT and since then the inventors have been working to come up with cool lightweight helmets that show how your mind reacts to your favorite activities. Their Kickstarter campaign is going on right now.

But the helmet isn’t just for your morning commute. You can use it in all sorts of other activities like rock climbing or skateboarding to see at which points you’re the most engaged. It can also be used to share your routes with friends to show the best bike routes in your city. The helmet uses Neurosky Mindset biosensor innovation in wearable technology to pick up ten types of brain waves. Ducao hopes the next step will be expanding the mental states that the helmet tracks.

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Images: Ben Tudhope

The post Bike to Work Stress? The MindRider Helmet Knows Your Mood Before You Do appeared first on EcoSalon.

No crash helmets or elbow pads here.

Helmets have become a magical talisman for bikers and non-bikers alike: As long as you are wearing one, you can’t be hurt. Bikers, continue to believe this, despite the fact that even doing everything right—wearing a helmet, staying in the marked lanes, using hand signals—can still get killed. In the United States, we cocoon ourselves in ever more complicated and expensive armor – even though most cyclists in famous biking cities like Amsterdam blithely pedal with their hair flying free in the breeze.

According to many members of the biking community, the real solution to making urban cycling a much less hazardous activity is not to exchange our flip-flops for closed-toed shoes and encase ourselves in full-body airbags. The solution is much simpler, and at the same time much more difficult: We need to make it as safe, easy and comfortable to ride a bike as it is to get to get in your car.

Recently, the Green Lane Project, hosted by Bikes Belong, officially kicked off in six selected focus cities: Austin, Chicago, Memphis, Portland (Oregon), San Francisco and Washington D.C. Each city will work towards becoming a national leader in installing a world-class network of marked (green) bike lanes.

Most of these cities are already recognized as being a great place to be a cyclist. But even in a town like Portland, Oregon, the bike lanes, signs and signals are usually only in the most high-traffic areas downtown. That leaves a lot of riders weaving in and out of 18-wheelers on small daily rides to the grocery store or the library. Hopefully a national initiative will help connect the small, patchwork pieces of the biking network into a large and fully usable one—a model that can then be emulated around the country.

Of course, many towns are instituting their own bike safety measures far under the national radar. Many are doing so with the help of the NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide, which compiles and evaluates the practices of successful cycling cities into a series of recommendations for integrating safe solutions into less bike-friendly cities.

If you’re interested in helping making your community a safer, easier place to bike—or if you’re getting a little tired of attaching little blinking lights to every appendage every time you wheel your bike out the door—you should check out the League of American Bicyclists, Bikes Belong and other organizations in your area. The day can’t be too far away when we can all happily chuck our helmets into the garage, safe in the knowledge that everyone else on the road knows they’re sharing it with us.

Image: ottochristensen

The post The Green Lane Project Targets Bike Safety in Cities appeared first on EcoSalon.