Absolutely. Cars and most country’s nearly ubiquitous car-centric infrastructure transforms the otherwise harmless bicycle ride into a fraught and sometimes downright dangerous experience. Unless you have the luxury of living somewhere that has gone through the concerted political process of rejecting motornormativity and transforming your infrastructure to one that accommodates human-scale transportation (We’re all looking enviously at you, Netherlands), helmets are just one of many externalities that we must shoulder as cyclists to accommodate our ultimately ruinous and unsustainable driving-as-default policies.