I'm sure this epiphany now has you wear a helmet in your car, where risk of life-threatening head-trauma is significantly higher than when riding a bicycle?
Helmets are still the best way to reduce a lot of head injuries among motorists. Cars travel at a much higher speed than pedestrians/bicycles, so it takes a lot more to dampen the injuries, and auto-related head injuries are simply more common than bicycle-related ones.
It's absolutely as reasonable to exhort motorists and pedestrians to wear helmets as it is to exhort cyclists to do so.
I personally find it insulting to have the same mindless comment appear every time somebody mentions helmet. It is inevitably a story of n=1 how somebody believes his helmet did X, and usually completely and utterly misses the point of the parent comment.
Just to reiterate this: if you suggest a piece of styrofoam is a useful protection in a discussion where the overwhelming risk factor is being crashed into by a 4 ton metal hunk, you're trivializing the issue and distracting away from meaningful actions.
Yeah, that's exactly why I have a bit of a problem with such guidelines.
It protects people from the normal consequences of insulting outer people's intelligence. Sometimes it's useful to know when your behaviour pisses other people off.
