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Cyclist in the evening 01 © Simon MacMichael.jpg“If mandatory safety measures are acceptable for car drivers, they should surely be acceptable for cyclists”: MP calls for cycling helmets to be made mandatory
A Conservative MP has called for the government to make wearing a helmet while cycling a legal requirement, and argued that if mandatory safety measures are acceptable for motorists, they “should surely be acceptable for cyclists”.
Mark Pawsey, the MP for Rugby, has introduced a compulsory cycle helmet bill into the House of Commons, due for a second reading in November, following a campaign led by one of his constituents, Oliver Dibsdale.
In 2015, the then-teenage Dibsdale suffered a serious brain injury after falling from his bike. Pawsey told the Commons today that the cyclist was informed by doctors at the time “that had he been wearing a helmet he may still have sustained an injury, but that it would have been far less severe”.
> Government shuts down mandatory cycling helmets question from Conservative MP
The MP continued: “He bitterly regrets his decision on that particular occasion to ride without a helmet. He has spoken to me in a very moving way about the impact that his injuries have had on his family, the guilt that he feels for the amount of time they have had to spend caring for him, and he very much wants to help other families avoid this fate, and this Bill will achieve this aim.
“Oliver makes the point that it will be far easier for parents to insist that their children wear a helmet if it becomes a legal requirement. He finds it extremely frustrating whenever he sees cyclists on the road without helmets, because from his personal experience he knows all too well the risk that they are taking.”
Addressing concerns that a mandatory bike helmet law would be difficult to enforce, Pawsey said: “While it would certainly create an additional burden on the police, it doesn’t strike me as being particularly difficult to enforce in comparison with other offences.
“If mandatory safety measures are acceptable for car drivers, they should surely be acceptable for cyclists. Now we know that cyclists are the most vulnerable road users.”
> Cyclists wearing helmets seen as "less human" than those without, researchers find
The MP also recounted in the Commons today that, during a recent family holiday, he initially declined a helmet while renting a bike. Pawsey claims that the person serving him “then looked me in the eye and asked me, ‘Just how many brains have you got, sir?’”
Pawsey’s Road Safety (Cycle Helmets) Bill is listed for a second reading on 24 November, but is unlikely – even if it were to achieve the required support in the chamber – to become law due to a lack of parliamentary time.
> Why is Dan Walker’s claim that a bike helmet saved his life so controversial?
Of course, Pawsey’s proposed piece of legislation isn’t the first time that compulsory bike helmets have been a topic of debate in parliament.
In December, the Department for Transport insisted that the government has “no intention” of making helmets mandatory, following a question from the Conservative MP for Shropshire constituency The Wrekin, Mark Pritchard.
In response to the MP’s question, minister of state for the department Jesse Norman said the matter had been considered “at length” during the cycling and walking safety review in 2018.
Norman, himself the Tory MP for Hereford and South Herefordshire, also added that while the Department for Transport “recommends that cyclists wear helmets”, the “safety benefits of mandating cycle helmets are likely to be outweighed by the fact that this would put some people off cycling”.
This latest attempt by an MP to reintroduce the ‘helmet debate’ into the Commons also comes in the same week that a new study from Australia – where helmet wearing is mandatory – found that an alarming number of motorists view cyclists wearing helmets and other safety gear as “less human”.
Of the 563 people surveyed for the study, conducted by Mark Limb of Queensland University of Technology and Sarah Collyer of Flinders University, 30 percent considered cyclists less than fully human, while cyclists with helmets were perceived as less human compared to those without, while cyclists with safety vests and no helmets were perceived as least human.
“Our findings add to this growing research, suggesting that cyclists wearing safety attire, particularly high-visibility vests, may be dehumanised more so than cyclists without safety attire,” the study concluded.
After obtaining a PhD, lecturing, and hosting a history podcast at Queen’s University Belfast, Ryan joined road.cc in December 2021 and since then has kept the site’s readers and listeners informed and enthralled (well at least occasionally) on news, the live blog, and the road.cc Podcast. After boarding a wrong bus at the world championships and ruining a good pair of jeans at the cyclocross, he now serves as road.cc’s senior news writer. Before his foray into cycling journalism, he wallowed in the equally pitiless world of academia, where he wrote a book about Victorian politics and droned on about cycling and bikes to classes of bored students (while taking every chance he could get to talk about cycling in print or on the radio). He can be found riding his bike very slowly around the narrow, scenic country lanes of Co. Down.
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72 comments
The post law accident rates completely failed to back this up of course but, for some unknown reason, your usual enthusiasm for 'real world, long term' data is not quite so ardent in this particular situation...
As I posted earlier seat belts are not mandatory you can buy an old sports car that can do well over 100mph that requires no seatbelts or roll bar so get your facts right about them being mandatory
Mandatory helmets make cycling less popular and less safe
Mandatory helmets make cycling less popular and less safe
Mandatory helmets make cycling less popular and less safe
Mandatory helmets make cycling less popular and less safe
Mandatory helmets make cycling less popular and less safe
Mandatory helmets make cycling less popular and less safe
Mandatory helmets make cycling less popular and less safe
Mandatory helmets make cycling less popular and less safe
Mandatory helmets make cycling less popular and less safe
And there is the problem. Mandatory seat belts and helmets for motorcyslist should not exist either. The fact that they may sive lives is irrelevant. It is s no ones business if I hurt myself and anyone thinking otherwise needs to mind their own flaming business. "ah but think about the cost to the country" you may say. If that was an issue then other things would also be banned.
I feel sorry for the person involved but they should mind their own business.
Mandatory seat belts for motorcyslist are just silly, I agree.
But what about byclist or tryclist?
Whilst the jury (for me) is still out on motorcycle helmets, the use of seatbelts is, unfortunately, everyone's business.
Without them the number of fatal road accidents will increase significantly, as they are designed to address a specific issue, namely passengers being thrown through the windscreen in head on collisions.
Fatal road accidents are terribly costly to society as a whole, both in the immediate disuption caused by road closure, but in the ongoing costs of the inevitable investigation.
It is likely that the number of fatal road collisions would not change or would decline if seat belts were banned, and unlikely that they would increase.
Fatal collisions are indeed a terrible cost to society, and we should be doing everything possible to prevent them, but seatbelts don't do that, they merely make surviving a collision more likely for the car occupants, while increasing the risk for the most vulnerable road user. We need to reduce collisions, and making them more survivable for the car occupants does not do that, and probably makes them more likely. Repeated yet again: the safest car has no seatbelts, air bags, crumple zones etc, but it has a rusty 14" bayonet sticking out of the steering wheel.
This needs repeating more often!
Most would be driven safely and the ones driven dangerously would eventually take care of the problem for us.
It may eventually take care of the reckless ones but since they are risk takers with no expectation of things going wrong, it would not reduce their risky behaviour.
I understand the notion that the safer you make an activity, the less regard to safety the participant will give, but I do feel the seatbelt situation is slightly different.
Belts were brought in as there was a distinct problem that needed addressing; the reality is that to avoid going through the windscreen you would need to be driving at under something like 20mph. Motorists are understandly unwilling to do this. It's also worth remembering that the majority of road collisions do not include vulnerable road users.
Now... looking at other motoring safety measures I'm totally with you... for every action, there is a reaction that negates most if not all potnetial benefits.
No it isn't. Risk compensation applies to any and every safety measure as far as I know, including seat belts.
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