The following appeared in a health newsletter."A ten-year nationwide study of the effectiveness of wearing a helmet while bicycling indicates that ten years ago, approximately 35 percent of all bicyclists reported wearing helmets, whereas today that numbe

The author in the given excerpt of an article analysis the factors behind the increase in the accidents involving bicyclists and proposes a plausible solution for the problem. He suggests that necessary actions be taken up by the government to ensure bike safety and reduce the number of accidents. However, the data provided by the author is vague and many questions need to be answered before his recommendations are implemented.

To support his disposition, the commentator provides study results of a ten-year nationwide analysis on the effectiveness of wearing a helmet. We don not know how the study was undertaken, was it a survey or an observation of the traffic department? Moreover, the study shows that the number of bicyclists wearing a helmet were 35% ten-years ago, while around 80% currently. The question is that the remarkable increase in awareness is due to strict traffic rules, general public awareness or a complete change in the study methodology in the past ten years? The author needs to explicitly mention how the numbers are derived and how one need to interpret the results.

Another study points out that the the number of accidents involving bicyclists increased by 200% in the past ten-years. May be the number of cyclists in the past decade have increase ten-folds while the accidents had increase by a factor three leading to a seemingly large percentage, while actually the ratio has decreased.Therefore, providing the total number of bicyclists and the actual number of accidents would present a better comparison. It also ambiguous how the study classifies an "accident"? May be only minor accidents without serious loss and damage have increased while the life-threatening accidents could have decreased dramatically in the past decade. A clear comment on this might help a better analysis.

The author implicitly assumes that such an increase in the accidents are due to irresponsible behaviour and casual approach due to availability of the helmets. However, there might be many other reasons of the increase in the number of accidents, the increase in traffic might be a possible reason. Also, there is no evidence that the people who met with an accident all used a helmet and this undermines the author's assumption.

Finally to conclude, the authors recommendation of launching a nation wide awareness program to educate the bicyclists of safe riding, although could be an effective solution but providing a more concrete evidence how this could lead to promote a safer experience for the bicyclists would strengthen his argument. Thus, providing the answers to such questions would help the government to evaluate the authors stand and invest in such a program if necessary.