Where do you stand on the hi-vis and helmets question? Dead against, or wouldn’t leave home without them?

When I first started riding in Oxford over 20 years ago, I’m not sure if eye-gouging yellow hi-visibility clothing even existed. I think perhaps it did as part of a donkey-jacket and DM ensemble for roadworkers, but I don’t think (m)any cyclists wore hi-vis in those days. Helmets had been around for a while and as a new-returnee to cycling I always wore mine for my five-mile commute from Grandpont up to Cutteslowe. I’d actually feel wrong, naked somehow, if I rode even to the local shop with no helmet. Gradually I realised that helmets are not all they’re cracked up to be. They can protect you in certain kinds of collision up to 20mph (the average top speed for an urban biker). But in a collision with a car doing anything over 20, they can’t help much.

I tend not to bother with the helmet for pootling on local errands, but I still wear one when I ride with my two-year-old daughter and so does she. I always wear one for anything slightly risky – mountain biking and fast road biking – but secretly know it’s more of a talisman than genuine life-saving equipment at speed.

Going out in the evening I always take a helmet – I don’t know, it just feels more dangerous in the dark somehow, and at night I now wear hi-vis and a mega-bright headlight fixed to my helmet. Perhaps it’s being a dad makes me want to be seen and be safe – certainly I do it with life-preservation in mind.

But I feel like I’m upping the ante for all cyclists, giving drivers the idea that all cyclists at night should and do look like day-glo miners with helmet-lights. If I ride dressed as if for street combat, am I making myself stand out and be seen (which is great) at the expense of the majority of normal cyclists with dim-but-legal lights and regular clothing? Am I helping to turn cycling from an everyday activity into something that you need loads of equipment to do?

The one big difference between Oxford – Copenhagen, even – and London is that here most cyclists look like ordinary people on bikes. In London, by contrast, there is this almost paramilitarised feel to cycling. People ride fast and especially in winter look more like special ops cave divers.

This just polarises the biking community and makes it easy for drivers to see us as these geeky ‘others’ rather than people on bikes. It’s expensive, it’s a nuisance to remember all the bits, and it puts off newbies. So I’m beginning to feel we’ve overdone the helmets and hi-vis thing, and when I go out all togged up I feel more and more like an SUV driver who’s driving the safest vehicle for him, and sod the consequences for pedestrian safety.

Wouldn’t life on two wheels be simpler and safer for us all if we just rode simple steeds without the special gear? Helmets offer more the myth of protection that genuine security and hi-vis is… ugly.