This article by fellow-MAMIL Michael O’Reilly makes an argument I’d been meaning to post. Whatever the merits of bike helmet laws in general, the costs clearly outweigh them in relation to bike-share schemes like CityCycle in Brisbane.
We clearly need a category of exemptions that lets people hire a slow bike for touring around our cities. Having done that, I’d extend it to anyone willing to take the trouble to apply for exemption, while maintaining the helmet rule as the default. I certainly wouldn’t seek an exemption – I like my head the way it is – but I can imagine there are people who would make the choice, and it’s not so obvious that their judgement should be over-ridden.
John Quiggin 
We should just remove the stupid helmet mandate and let people make up their own mind.
I’ll translate this post: “The bike helmet law sux”
Melbourne City Council is reducing the city speed limit to 40 kph, which will make things safer for helmetless cyclists.
“We should just remove the stupid helmet mandate and let people make up their own mind.”
No, Terje, an enlightened state protects fools from themselves.
Certainly sux’s for the 52 year old woman serial offender in Scone NSW who ran up so many unpaid fines for failure to comply with the helmet law on her shopping trips – yes her bike had a basket – that the sheriff sent out to reclaim monies owed in kind, took away her spare bike.
This followed the pair having a cup of tea and a chat to discuss the outstanding fines and her absolute refusal to pay up.
I wear a helmet and even feel a bit naked without, but it is madness to maintain this mandatory law. The actions of the sheriff suggest he would agree.
What Terje said (I don’t say that too often).
I’m as unconvinced of the merits of bike-share schemes as I am of those of bike helmet laws. Why should tourists be exempt from silly draconian laws that citizens have to comply with?
I agree with You, TerjeP. With the rider of cycle education, which I believe that we have in our primary schools (NSW).
An exemption for suitable slow bikes provided in a bike share scheme seems fine and an exemption if the individual is willing to pay for compensating insurance also seems fine. Those who want to allow themselves to be at additional risk, can, on average, expect to cost medicare more. If they pay that more, where is the problem?
I’d favour leaving the law as is, but rarely if ever actually enforcing it.
We all know from the work of psychologists such as Tversky and Kahneman that the individual’s decision making process doesn’t resemble the optimal balance of risk and reward that a hard-line libertarian would suppose.
Nevertheless I agree that there is something important to be said for allowing people to make their own decisions in situations like this, even if it leads to bad outcomes.
So if the law stays in place it serves as a nudge to push people in a socially helpful direction. Simultaneously anybody who had strong feelings about the issue would be free to ride as they liked, but would have to make a conscious decision to ignore sound advice.
I think you can make a case that every individual should wear a hemet. If they ride anyway and crash they are unlikely to be worse off for wearing a helmet (apart from any risk compensation) and will often get some protection from it.
But the case for mandating helmets is much murkier – if the laws contribute to society as a whole driving where they could ride and being more sedantary and less healthy the individual risk of injury in accidents is outweighed by the collective benefit of more active people. And it seems clear that in the case of Australian bike share schemes the helmet laws are a big disincentive.
It would become impractical to enforce the law – and hence make a joke of the law- if exemptions were extended to cyclists not on the share bikes.
I’m with Jerry Seinfeld on this:
“What was happening, apparently, was that we were involved in a lot of activities that were cracking our heads. We chose not to avoid doing those activities but, instead, to come up with some sort of device to help us enjoy our head-cracking lifestyles. And even that didn’t work because not enough people were wearing them so we had to come up with the helmet law. Which is even stupider: the idea behind the helmet law being to preserve a brain whose judgment is so poor it does not even try to avoid the cracking of the head it’s in.”
I wear a helmet religiously because I once came off the bike after some rain and hit my head so hard that a chunk of compressed polysterene the size of a golf ball got gouged out of the helmet.
If that had been my head, I’d be dead or brain-damaged now.
I’m happy for natural selection to take its course, with the caveat that most riders I know have had more accidents due to motorists than their own error.
The bicycle helmet laws are not just for the benefit of the individual. They are for the benefit of society. Head injuries cost all of us enormously and they have been statistically increasing as speed of transport and numbers of vehicles have been increasing, starting with the horse, probably. If a rider selects the option of not wearing a helmet and they then suffer a huge head injury, whilst riding within the law, this will cost many weeks in hospital, a year or two of rehabilitation, loss of ability to earn income and loss of enjoyment of life as well as loss to family and friends of the fully functioning person. Is that what a person selecting not to wear a helmet wants? When you are unconscious you cannot take care of yourself; someone else has to. If you do not fully recover, other people need to help for the rest of your life. Better to avoid the situation if possible. The argument can be made on a financial, a social, or an existential basis.
I have heard there is an argument that helmets decrease side vision. If so, this needs to be taken into account with driver education and laws, I guess, so that people will realise that the bike-rider is riding partly blind. Drivers also have blindspots.
None of this was much of a problem when we only used our feet. Then there must have been far fewer head injuries. Humans have not really adapted to the changes.
The bicycle helmet laws are not just for the benefit of the individual. They are for the benefit of society. Head injuries cost all of us enormously and they have been statistically increasing as speed of transport and numbers of vehicles have been increasing, starting with the horse, probably. If a rider selects the option of not wearing a helmet and they then suffer a huge head injury, whilst riding within the law, this will cost many weeks in hospital, a year or two of rehabilitation, loss of ability to earn income and loss of enjoyment of life as well as loss to family and friends of the fully functioning person. Is that what a person selecting not to wear a helmet wants? When you are unconscious you cannot take care of yourself; someone else has to. If you do not fully recover, other people need to help for the rest of your life. Better to avoid the situation if possible. The argument can be made on a financial, a social, or an existential basis.
I have heard there is an argument that helmets decrease side vision. If so, this needs to be taken into account with driver education and laws, I guess, so that people will realise that the bike-rider is riding partly blind. Drivers also have blindspots.
None of this was much of a problem when we only used our feet. Then there must have been far fewer head injuries. Humans have not really adapted to the changes.
Of course, you can also get a huge injury whilst wearing a helmet, but without the helmet the injury would be still worse.
Why can’t the cycle schemes provide helmets (with disposable inside covers to prevent spread of lice)?
Sorry, I stuffed up the above comments. The second one is a bit more detailed than the first.
Both the linked article and this post argue on the basis that hire bikes are slower, therefore have a lower risk of serious head injury. Are there any relevant stats to support this? I.e. numbers on cycling injuries where speed was at fault, versus collision with vehicle (regardless of cyclist or driver being at fault).
I also wonder, would mandatory helmet laws be in place if there were no cars or trucks on the road? I think not, but whilst that makes A point, it’s not THE point.
Further, it seems to me (living inner Melbourne) that the law is effectively optional. I see so many cycling without a helmet that I reckon the law is weakly enforced enough that those who are against it can safely flaunt it.
Disclosure: I spent the first half of my life riding without a helmet, the latter half wearing one because of the law. I would never have worn one before the law: uncool! But now the uncoolness has gone I think most people, including myself, would continue wearing them even if not legally required to.
As cycling, with a helmet or otherwise, leads to reduced health costs for the cyclist and reduced congestion costs for everybody else, and as the helmet law reduces the rate of cycling significantly, and as the minimal protection offered by helmets is insufficient to compensate for the negative health costs caused by the reduction in cycling due to the helmet law, we’d all be better off if the law was repealed.
I’m not telling people not to wear a helmet. It might even be advisable to wear one. But from a public health perspective it’s definitely unwise to mandate their use.
The problem is, Sheila N, is that helmets can produce far worse injuries, particularly neck injuries. Certainly extreme riders are advised to use protection, but the argument is that casual riders have a very low insidence of injury. This is the European experience where people ride bikes to get places rather than make ego statements. This is what the hire bikes are about also, getting from one place to another. The safety message has been delivered. I can’t get into a car without my daughters pestering me till I put on a seat belt. Today’s kids will don the helmet naturally, and for that reason I believe that “choice” will work with bicycle helmets. When people feel danger exposed they will seek suitable protection, conversely when they don’t there is a good chance that there is no danger. Cycles at pedestrian speeds are as safe as walking,…or should we all where head protection 24/7 just in case.
People do fall out of bed , you know.
Unfortunately, a significant number of car drivers in Australia are like Terje.
They’re stupid, selfish, murderous a–holes, even though they might deny that’s what they are, and may not even be smart enough to recognise that that’s what they are.
Cycling on roads in Australia is very dangerous, with or without helmets. Encouraging more on-road cycling is probably a bad thing.
I know it’s not like this is in a very small number of places in Europe, but Australia just isn’t one of those places. Wishing for it won’t make it so.
@SJ
You’re right. Cyclists have been responsible for my losing so many wing mirrors as I whizz past.
@Simon
An assertion I’d be unsurprised to find, widely at variance with fact. For one, cyclists, because of the longer time they spend enroute probably do not reduce congestion as much as you might think.
The law is the law, the bicycle hire scheme will continue to lose money, and continue to be an indisputable negative aspersion on the judgement of those who advocated for it, and implemented it.
Helmet laws reduce cycling. Simple.
@Simon
Maybe surprisingly, the Dutch Cyclists Association has the same opinion, and the reject mandatory helmets. Mandatory helmets reduce cycle use (too much hassle), and the negative effect of that is much larger than the positive gain in health because a few accidents have less severe consequences.
Perhaps they could introduce a two tiered system, riders on bikeways or bike designated areas do not need helmets whereas on shared carriage way helmets are mandatory. Australian drivers are inherently anti bike and often behave badly when it comes to sharing the roads.
Once, I came off a motorcycle at a “mere” 60 kph. Going too fast around a greasy, reverse camber corner caused the front wheel to skid and re-grip. This initiated a tank-slapping death wobble, I went over the handle bars and slid along the road backwards on my head and one shoulder, rest of the body in the air.
Lesson one is my driver error of course. Lesson two is that my motorcycle helmet sported an oval patch ground down to the felt lining by the slide along the bitumen. Bicycles can do 60 kph downhill so bicycle riders can easily face such an impact. So, if you want your bare skull cracked open or skullbone ground down till the brain matter is exposed, then cycle without a helmet.
Lesson three (from other incidents), is that cars and bicycles should not mix ever. Ride on back streets and dedicated bikeways only. For example, any cyclist who rides along Sir Fred Schonnel Drive on the roadway is sadly asking for trouble.
I agree, this would be a good candidate for ‘nudge’ type reform. Make it the default that you have to wear a helmet, but that you can easily apply for an exemption. Government intervention doesn’t need to be stronger than a nudge to encourage people to think about the benefits of wearing a helment. Given the hype around ‘nudges’ and ‘nudge units’ etc, I think this is probably a good way to achieve some change in this area at this time. You could also have an exemption for bike share schemes, with the bike share membership being a form of exemption.
I doubt there would be a big jump in new cyclists*, as some expect, but this would take the focus off this debate and allow more discussion about how to improve infrastructure.
* A helmet cost about 50 per cent of the price of a bike when the mandatory helmet laws were introduced. For many then cyclists, the relative cost was even worse as the cost of the bike was sunk. Now helmets cost less than 5 per cent of the price of a bike, so I can’t see many people opting out because of cost.
Rog,
I think that your compromise is the best workable solution that could be framed in understandable and acceptable legislation. This would make the rent-a-bike a servicable proposition while still maintaining a broader safety message.
John, I don’t think you can just assert all this with a “clearly” or two.
You can’t sensibly separate the bike helmet law in general from bikeshare in particular. There’s no compelling reason why CityCycle riders should have the privilege of riding without a helmet and not the other cyclists who’ll always make up the overwhelming majority of riders.
An exemption would undermine the helmet law. It might be a misguided law in the opinion of some (me included) but any change requires a wide community debate and a stronger rationale than just trying to save CityCycle. It should be all or nothing.
In any event I don’t think it’s obvious that an exemption would make schemes like CityCycle and Melbourne Bikeshare a “success”. There are other reasons they’re not doing well, including too few bikes, too few stations, poorly designed tariffs and, especially, lack of safe cycling infrastructure and unsympathetic drivers. Perceptions of safety are very important for the sorts of casual riders attracted to bikeshare.
I don’t think changing helmet requirements will make a difference to the success of initiatives such as CityCycle. The issues are only partially related at best.
CityCycle will always be a dud because Brisbane is simply the opposite of everything that makes bike share initiatives work in other cities like Paris (i.e. right climate, compact city, flat riding opportunities, relatively low probability of unfortunate incident with a car etc etc).
@Ikonoclast
“any cyclist who rides along Sir Fred Schonnel Drive on the roadway is sadly asking for trouble”
The logic is identical to the old line about how young women wearing the ‘wrong’ sort of clothing should steer clear of night spots, or they’re only asking to be molested.
Meanwhile, are these ‘back streets’ you’re happy to ride along banned for cars? If not, the same issues apply as on main roads, with the added hazards of cars backing out of driveways and ‘doorings’.
Car drivers will simply have to learn to share the road. A good start would be to introduce the graduated right of way rules based on vulnerability they have in Holland – pedestrians have absolute right of way, followed by cyclists, mopeds, motorcyclists and then cars. You as a driver hit a cyclist, and you are automatically in the wrong, with stiff penalties including loss of licence and confiscation of vehicle.
On the topic de jour, the more cyclists there are on the road the safer it is for all cyclists. My life was undoubtedly saved by a cycle helmet two decades back, and I wouldn’t ever ride without one, but anything that discourages riding is a bad thing for me and every other cyclist.
Last, the acccident research stats are very clear that the ‘safe’ speed for cars in relation to pedestrian and cyclist injuries/deaths is 30km/h, not 40km/h. At 40km/h, an accident is more likely than not to result in serious injury or death. At 30km/h, the odds are better than even that the accident will not result in serious injury or death. Not coincidentally, 30km/h is the speed most cyclists travel at, on the flat and in the absence of a headwind.
@sam
It seems you have joined me on the freedom hating side then 🙂
@Sheila Newman
But where do we draw the line? Should require occupants of cars to also wear a helmet as head injuries in car accidents also cost our health system.
Maybe we should require occupants of cars to wear some sort of restraining device to stop them being thrown through the windscreen. Oh wait….
I always wear a bike helmet, and have seen several accidents where the presence of a helmet has significantly reduced head injury. However I’d favour voluntary helmets, except for kids, who would have to wear them.
I travel to the Philippines a lot. Both bike and motor bike helmet use is rare. Same for the other Asian countries I have visited.
The only motor bike rider I saw with a helmet in the Philippines was not wearing it.
He was carrying his helmet under his arm to put on in case he saw a cop. (Avoids a bribe). If there was an accident, that helmet under his arm would be a lethal projectile.
Do helmets make much of a difference for bike accidents?
I find that most bike riders in the CBD to be on mission to kill themselves. Weaving between cars and buses; seeking out and finding every driver’s blind spot. Oblivious to their tiny profile in rear vision mirrors. I will stop here. enough.
Notions of freedom are meaningless when you are dead
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2586788/
Most readers/commentators here seem to make the assumption that bicycle helmets serve some useful purpose other than generating sales for bicycle helmet manufacturers. Most people I talk to about bicycle helmets and helmet laws make the assumption that a protective “something” must increase safety: I have not seen any evidence of this. As one person has put it (paraphrase), “Wearing the equivalent of a Styrofoam beer cooler on your head is not likely to do a lot of good”.
I have not seen any evidence of the effectiveness of helmets and certainly no evidence that a mandatory helmet law does anything other than reduce the number of cyclists on the road and increase the danger for those remaining cyclists. (see Smeed’s Law.)
I have not kept up with the most recent research in the area in the last 3-5 years so perhaps some dramatic study has shown that bicycle helmets work but I have not seen any thing to make me think that they do. An anti-mandatory helmet site but, as far as I can see, with a good research base is http://cyclehelmets.org/1121.html. Disclaimer- I’m not involved but I do now a couple of the people.
You might want to have a look at some of the work by Dorre Robinson of the University of New England in such journals as Accident Analysis and Prevention for discussions in the Australian context in particular.
Perhaps the seminal paper on the use of bicycle helmets is (Thompson et al., 1989) which generated the mass-movement to wear helmets. If you read the paper it is riddled with bad methodology, leading one Internet commentator to describe it as a study that showed that young middle-class children riding in parks had fewer head injuries than older, poorer kids riding on streets. A close reading of paper suggests that this is being kind.
I did a review of a medical position paper issued by the Canadian Academy of Sports Medicine a few years ago. Other than having most of the references wrong or untraceable, confusing things like kilometres-per-hour and miles-per-hour, using outdated and foreign statistics and a few other things, it might have earned a pass mark in a junior high school course.
I really don’t think that I have seen a decent study that supports bicycle helmets. Often the authors seem to rather wishfully interpret their results as showing a positive result when they at best are neutral and often negative. Perhaps one of my favourites is a Nova Scotian study (which ref I seem to have lost but I think it is in CMAJ or Canadian Family Medicine) showed that after the law was implemented, helmet use increased for those cyclists still on the road– cycling dropped drastically — but the per-capita injury rate remained the same or increased. Strangely enough, the authors didn’t seem to notice this latter effect.
Reference
Thompson, R. S., Rivara, F. P., & Thompson, D. C. (1989). A case-control study of the effectiveness of bicycle safety helmets. New England Journal of Medicine, 320(21), 1361 – 1367.
@Jim Rose
They have very low willingness to pay to protect their heads or their lives because their lives are not worth much. All very rational really (like all ex post explanations, maybe I’ll grow up to be an economist).
@jrkrideau It would appear that most pro helmet research is flawed
http://www.cyclehelmets.org/1251.html
“Smeed’s Law” (which postulated that deaths are a concave increasing function of vehicle numbers) is trivially falsified by the fact that the number of deaths from road accidents has fallen dramatically in Australia and other countries, while vehicle numbers have increased. A site that quotes it is almost certainly worse than useless as a source of information.
It’s worth noting that John Adams, the leading populariser of Smeed’s Law, and an important source for anti-helmet arguments and similar, is a climate & passive smoking delusionist. Any claim he makes should be assumed false until proven otherwise.
Of course, the fact that anti-helmet sources use bogus arguments doesn’t show that their conclusion is false. But, in thinking about the question, I’d start by looking at actual accidents, and checking whether helmets work to reduce the severity of head injuries. If they do, then there’s a strong burden of proof on the anti-helmet side to show that helmets are associated with an increase in the accident rate, and to present a plausible causal mechanism.
So this John Adams believes in AGW and passive smoking? Agreed that would make someone delusional, but not necessarily grounds to automatically rule out his observations on other matters.
My prior is that helmets are certainly going to be helpful for somebody if they are to be hit hard in the head. As this is certainly conceivable falling off a bike, I’d probably require a fair bit of evidence before I changed my mind on their importance. If there was a strong scientific consensus that helmets were practically useless that’d be enough, but a few assertions and a single journal article isn’t super convincing to me.
Secondly my helmet in no way resembles a styrofoam beer cooler. Perhaps the sort of people that can look at a hard, strong, thick piece of protective equipment and see a beer cooler aren’t the best sources on this one.
@paul of albury
“If they ride anyway and crash they are unlikely to be worse off for wearing a helmet …”
But the point is that with the helmet laws they are less likely to ride at all (eg bike share schemes becomes unviable). And riding is a Good Thing for health.
So it’s not automatic that we get a net gain to Medicare from helmet laws, and there’s a fair bit of empiric evidence that in fact we’re making a net loss. Even if you think the state has the right to enforce healthy behaviour its not at all clear that it is in fact doing so.
@derrida derider
Of course just as people are likely to substitute away from cycling when they have to wear a helmet, they are also likely to substitute into jogging or aerobics or some other form of exercise. It is certainly possible that helmets just switch around the allocation of exercise into safer forms and away from unsafe ones.
A more balanced source for information on the pro/anti helmet arguments is “The Conversation” (http://theconversation.edu.au/). Search for “cycle helmet” or similar.
cyclehelmets.org seems to be pretty dedicated to the proposition that helmets have little or no merit.
I personally think that helmets are a good idea, particularly for off-road or higher-speed cycling, but I’m not sure that making them compulsory for all cycling is the best course of action.
Certainly, I feel feel much safer without a helmet in France or Japan than with a helmet in Australia. Imposing compulsory helmets is an attempt to provide a technical solution to a social problem (aggressive, non-cooperative driving habits.)
One serious problem with providing an exemption for the hirers of city bikes is the prospect of litigation by anyone who suffers a head injury on such a bike. They could well argue that the providers failed in their duty of care by not requiring them to wear a helmet. I am not sure which way the law would go on this, but the possibility would raise the cost of insurance for scheme.
(More reason for sane accident & disability support, but that is an argument for another day.)
Adelaide seems to get around this by providing helmets for their free city bike scheme, but that is administered by people rather than automated. I don’t know what they do about sanitizing the helmets between users.
@Hal9000
Hal, your reasoning is incorrect but perhaps I did not express myself well. The colloquial phrase “asking for trouble” does not mean that people necessarily deserve the trouble they get. The phrase simply points out if you put yourself in harm’s way, advertantly or inadvertantly, you statistically increase your chances of coming to harm.
My essential suggestion was that cyclists on a winding, rising, dipping, busy four lane roads with narrow lanes and frequent large vehicles like buses, (e.g. Sir Fred Schonell Drive) are advertantly or inadvertantly asking for trouble is a perfectly valid statement. That road, as it stands, is not simply not safe for cyclists.
I’ve been all of a regular pedestrian, car driver, motorcyclist, cyclist, light truck and heavy machinery driver on public roads. This reasonably wide experience has taught me that many people seem not to understand the problems each category of travellers in this set face when interacting with travellers in other categories. Whether this is through lack of wide experience or lack of the ability to carry personally learned lessons across the categories I am not sure. It’s probably a bit of both.
You state “car drivers will simply have to learn to share the road”. The statement presumes that it is only car drivers who do not know how to share the road in a reasonable manner. However, this error of assuming excess entitlement also extends to cyclists. A good rider/driver not only drives their own vehicle they also “drive” all the vehicles around them. That is to say they fearfully and cautiously give adequate space, breaking distance, anticipation room and general allowance for error.
Plenty of cyclists (like car drivers ) also behave with a clearly excessive sense of entitlement. This inflated sense of entitlement is particularly foolish when the hard facts of physics don’t care who was in the right but simply act in favour of those with the most encasing metal for protection, particularly metal with properly engineered crumple zones. I really wonder if many cyclists realise how hard they are to see at times in busy traffic when drivers are watching at least half a dozen or more things around their vehicle at the same time.
Busy, multi-lane traffic is simply not the place for cycles, full stop. Cyclists require and deserve dedicated bikeways on all major city roads. Motorists on busy multi-lane roads require and deserve to be relieved of the danger of hitting cyclists who do not belong in modern traffic.
Where cyclists want the right to ride on secondary public roads and back streets and mix it with cars I agree… provided they pass tests, get licences and pay fees and insurance just like car drivers.
@NickR
I think the argument is that the helmet law discourages people from functional cycling, which gives them incidental exercise.
The cost and bother of a helmet is trivial if you are going out for serious exercise, but it could make the difference between using a bike or taking a car to the supermarket.
@Blair: Can and does, make the difference. Hence there are fewer, far fewer, rides by casual cyclers.
SJ – being a completely rude prick doesn’t help your argument. However reading the rest of what you said it seems clear that you don’t actually have an argument. Which means we’re just left with the fact that you’re a rude prick.
@Steve at the Pub
So, the argument is that having to purchase and put on a simple piece of apparel before undertaking an activity, massively reduces the number of people wanting to undertake that activity!!
I guess I can expect everyone to give up swimming (such a bother purchasing and wearing a swimming costume). I guess I can expect everyone to give up even going out. Gee, I mean you have to purchase and put on clothes. Man, what an imposition!
Such an argument against wearing a bicycle helmet (that it requires a purchase and a little inconvenience) is ridiculous and petty in the extreme when compared to all the other cases where we accept that same essential rule without question. If people hanging their case on that argument were consistent, they would be protesting against the law that says they have to wear clothes when they go out in public in a clement climate. After all, clothes are not strictly necessary from a physiological point of view in a mild climate or indoors, say at a shopping centre. So where are the protests at being forced to wear clothes?
Oh hang on, in one case (going out without clothes) almost all people would suffer extreme embarassment due to the socially inculcated complexes they have about being bare. Yet in the other case, people complain about being required to take a simple measure to protect themselves against physical harm.
As usual, with virtually all socialised humans, fear of social embarrassment is a much more powerful force than logical risk assessment. Thus, the best way to get people to wear safety gear (in any undertaking) would be to push the notion that they look ridiculous, laughable and unfashionable if not wearing it. If I were as clever as Oscar Wilde, I could come up with a bon mot about this.