Re: Candice Zimmerman’s Aug. 1 letter, “Don’t forget a helmet”:

It is irritating how bicycling is being deceptively portrayed as such an unusually dangerous activity and how a plastic-Styrofoam hat is automatically assumed to be the hocus-pocus panacea for the relatively small risk of associated injuries.

In fact, driving a motor vehicle and walking each carry a higher risk of fatal injury than bicycling, both in total statistics per overall time period and in statistics per unit of respective activity time.

Yet I sense that it is these motorists and pedestrians without much bicycling experience who are hypocritically the loudest and rudest helmet-thumpers (pun intentional) upon everyone else doing an outdoor activity other than their own.

Much junk science has been used to exaggerate the benefits of helmets, such as in the notorious claim from a 1987 study in Seattle that bicycling helmets reduce the risk of a head injury by 85 percent in the event of an impact to the head — yet such claims have failed to be reproduced statistically in the real world.

For an international, objective resource on bicycling helmets, see the “Cycle Helmets” Web site administered by the Bicycle Helmet Research Foundation at http://www.cyclehelmets.org/. For further information on bicycling and helmet safety and politics, see the “Vehicular Cyclist” Web site at http://www.magma.ca/~ocbc/.

No piece of safety equipment makes a sufficient substitute for behavioral competency and compliance with right-of-way rules, whether it’s with bicycling, motoring, walking or skating.

— Andrew Smolik, Thousand Oaks