Government surveys show Victoria cycling participation down since helmet law

To the nannies who want helmet laws instead of simply letting people make their risk decisions (regardless of how good they may be) have a look at how police use helmet laws.

http://www.brisbanecyclist.com/forum/topics/in-the-news-march-2016?comme...

You really don't want helmet laws causing such damage to cycling encouragement in England.

Robinson DL; Head injuries and bicycle helmet laws; Accid Anal Prev, 28, 4: p 463-475, 1996

Robinson's 1996 report provided injury data for children. In Victoria, the equivalent number of injuries for pre law levels of number of cyclists increased by 15% from 1990 to 1992. Robinson provides data in Table 2 for children in NSW. The equivalent number of injuries increased from 1310 (384 head + 926 other injuries) pre law in 1991 to 2083 (488 head + 1595 other injuries) in 1993. The relative injury rate increased by 59% from 1310 to 2083. The relative increase in 'other' injuries of 72% and 27% for 'head' raises serious concerns. The proportion of head injuries decreased from 29.3% to 23.4% and would give the impression of a benefit if viewed in isolation.

[1] Robinson DL; Head injuries and bicycle helmet laws; Accid Anal Prev, 28, 4: p 463-475, 1996  http://www.cycle-helmets.com/robinson-head-injuries.pdf  

Erke and Elvik 2007 examined research from Australia and New Zealand and stated: "There is evidence of increased accident risk per cycling-km for cyclists wearing a helmet. In Australia and New Zealand, the increase is estimated to be around 14 per cent." The findings were based on six reports, four from when legislation was in place.

[1] Erke A, Elvik R, Making Vision Zero real: Preventing Pedestrian Accidents And Making Them Less Severe, Oslo June 2007. page 28 https://www.toi.no/getfile.php/Publikasjoner/T%C3%98I%20rapporter/2007/8...

As a citizen, I am happy with fellow citizens deciding to not wear helmets if they become fully accountable for their decision.

As a taxpayer, I do not wish to contribute to the recovery of such people after accidents, other than as necessary.

If people decide to not wear a helmet, they should fund their own recovery until such time their assets and income are exhausted whereupon they would receive the normal welfare and healthcare benefits. Upon recovery their income would be garnisheed to a reasonable level until they pay back in full the welfare and health benefits.

Lid debates, Gotta love 'em.

In 1990 bicycle helmet legislation in Victoria was associated with a drop of 36% in the numbers cycling in Melbourne. Post law in 1991, 10% extra wore helmets compared to 36% fewer people cycling. The law resulted in 30 more teenagers wearing helmets compared with 623 fewer cycling, a drop of 48%. For other parts of Victoria that generally had a higher proportion of cycling than in Melbourne and lower helmet wearing rates, the reduction appeared to be even higher judging by accident data for Melbourne compared with country locations. Between 2001 and 2011, Melbourne gained 636,300 new residents and provided extra cycling infrastructure, so more people are now cycling near to the city centre. The population of Victoria increased from approximately 4.4 million in 1990 to 5.9 million in 2015. Vic Roads had conducted annual surveys of the wearing rates from 1983 to 1990. They discontinued the annual surveys and were wilfully blind in not adequately monitoring the extent of cycling being discouraged and the health effects.

The helmet law debate has been ongoing for about 26 years and an Australia Senate Inquiry has taken submissions, ‘Personal choice and community impacts’ with more than 400 submissions, many concerning cycle helmet legislation. http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Economics...

Submission No 411 includes;

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H) Increased risk of injury per cyclist since helmet laws were introduced.

Several analyses have compared numbers of injuries with the numbers of cyclists. They all suggest that injuries per cyclist have increased from what would have been expected without helmet laws. In New Zealand, from 1989 to 2011, average time spent cycling (on roads and footpaths) fell by 79% for children aged 5-12 (from 28 to 6 minutes per person per week) and 81% for 13-17 year olds (52 to 10 mins/person/week). Adult cycling declined from 8 to 5 minutes/person/week then trended back up to 8 minutes. Graphs of cycle use over time provide strong evidence that the requirement to wear a helmet discouraged cycling.  The reductions in cycling were accompanied by increased injury rates. Between 1989 and 2012, fatal or serious injuries per million hours of cycling increased by 86% for children (from 49 to 91), 181% for teenagers (from 18 to 51) and 64% for adults (from 23 to 38).

In brief the advice to wear a helmet is in serious doubt. It is a complicated issue of cycling, risks and helmet effects. There is also another side, of excessive and false claims leading to trying to mislead other countries into introducing cycle helmet laws. In Australian and New Zealand their standards prevent other helmets approved to other standards from being used.  

The Senate Inquiry received a few misleading submissions from helmet law supporters. 

In 1990 bicycle helmet legislation in Victoria was associated with a drop of 36% in the numbers cycling in Melbourne. Post law in 1991, 10% extra wore helmets compared to 36% fewer people cycling. The law resulted in 30 more teenagers wearing helmets compared with 623 fewer cycling, a drop of 48%. For other parts of Victoria that generally had a higher proportion of cycling than in Melbourne and lower helmet wearing rates, the reduction appeared to be even higher judging by accident data for Melbourne compared with country locations. Between 2001 and 2011, Melbourne gained 636,300 new residents and provided extra cycling infrastructure, so more people are now cycling near to the city centre. The population of Victoria increased from approximately 4.4 million in 1990 to 5.9 million in 2015. Vic Roads had conducted annual surveys of the wearing rates from 1983 to 1990. They discontinued the annual surveys and were wilfully blind in not adequately monitoring the extent of cycling being discouraged and the health effects.

The helmet law debate has been ongoing for about 26 years and the Australia Senate Inquiry has taken submissions, ‘Personal choice and community impacts’ with more than 400 submissions, many concerning cycle helmet legislation. http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Economics...

Submission No 411 includes;

--------------

H) Increased risk of injury per cyclist since helmet laws were introduced.

Several analyses have compared numbers of injuries with the numbers of cyclists. They all suggest that injuries per cyclist have increased from what would have been expected without helmet laws. In New Zealand, from 1989 to 2011, average time spent cycling (on roads and footpaths) fell by 79% for children aged 5-12 (from 28 to 6 minutes per person per week) and 81% for 13-17 year olds (52 to 10 mins/person/week). Adult cycling declined from 8 to 5 minutes/person/week then trended back up to 8 minutes. Graphs of cycle use over time provide strong evidence that the requirement to wear a helmet discouraged cycling.  The reductions in cycling were accompanied by increased injury rates. Between 1989 and 2012, fatal or serious injuries per million hours of cycling increased by 86% for children (from 49 to 91), 181% for teenagers (from 18 to 51) and 64% for adults (from 23 to 38).

In brief the advice to wear a helmet is in serious doubt. It is a complicated issue of cycling, risks and helmet effects. There is also another side, of excessive and false claims leading to trying to mislead other countries into introducing cycle helmet laws. In Australian and New Zealand their standards prevent other helmets approved to other standards from being used.  

The Senate Inquiry received a few misleading submissions from helmet law supporters. 

the only reason I'll enter a helmet debate is to point out that they are a pointless diversion.

in some collisions or falls helmets may mitigate injury.

to encourage more people to cycle mandating helmet wearing doesn't solve anything.

why don't people cycle (or walk) more?  - answer: road design and aggressive driving.

(there is no shortage of helmets!)

wearing a mandatory helmet doesn't make me feel that is safe for my kids to negotiate impatient traffic with narrow lanes.

a change is needed in how we view priorities for transport - arguing about helmets (and hi viz and pavement riding) are all p-ssing around the edges .

I don't know if the figures are correct or not, if you want to do research you can find statistics to support your cause whatever it may be.
As for bike helmets, as a young bloke I rode bikes for years without a helmet, and I had my share of close call s , and buy either good luck or perhaps someone was looking after me up there, my rough head stayed in one piece.
Personally I think bike helmets are a good thing, and in my old age I'm happy to wear one.

Does anyone honestly know how helmets are supposed to work and the effectiveness of different helmets in given situations? Beyond anecdotes about "helmet saved my life" or "I was strangled by the strap and I'm typing this from purgatory".

Helmet reviews on sites like road.cc are concerned with aesthetics, weight, the number and size of air vents, and, if lucky, a small reference to SNEL / CE rating.

Occasionally there will be a warning not to buy second hand, which is excellent advice for hard shell motorcycle lids as they are designed to absorb one hard impact, but does that really apply to cycle helmets that have a very different construction?

Thanks felixcat, I like the quote below from - http://www.badscience.net/2013/12/bicycle-helmets-and-the-law-a-perfect-...

Gareth Rees said,

December 14, 2013 at 5:05 pm

Something that I think is missing from this type of discussion is some acknowledgement of the level of intervention. It’s not like discussing whether to recommend that patients take drug A rather than drug B. Doctors are discussing whether to recommend that the police start arresting and prosecuting people who cycle with bare heads. It seems to me that a much greater level of harm, and a much higher standard of proof ought to be needed before advocating such a step.

For example, doctors are pretty certain that surgery is an effective treatment for some types of cancer. But can you imagine doctors campaigning to make it a crime to decline a surgical excision? The idea would be totally against the principles of ethical medicine: major surgery can only be done with the patient’s consent.

So why do some doctors feel happy to recommend that the criminal justice system enforce their preferred intervention in the case of cycle helmets? What happened to the principle of patient consent?

Unfortunately that principle of patient consent has been thrown out in Australia not only with bike helmets but also with flouride in water. A toxic chemical that has known negative health effects for some people yet in many areas is added to everyone's water just to reduce cavities in teeth that are easily repaired anyway.

If doctors are so keen on laws to control everyone for the people's own good then why don't doctors call to make alcohol, smoking & sugar illegal? Then why stop there? Cars cause air pollution related ilness, seditary lifestyle disease & car crashes so lets see doctors call to ban people driving cars. Maybe then the roads will be so much safer that cyclists won't "need" helmets in the first place.

I think Bill H was being a tad sarcastic.

I wear a helmet much of the time (training rides and commutes). I do events and they all demand that I wear one, so I get used to them on my usual rides.

That's why I wear one, but I feel a bit 'dirty' doing it, as I see them as a symbol of losing the fight against being driven into by big lumps of metal (sorry, people driving lumps of metal into other people).

Intervention by medical bodies on sport and recreation is often unhelpful - or at least the headlines from it are. Every few years there'll be a death from boxing or rugby and what also makes the news, for balance, is the draconian recommendation, from a bunch of medical 'experts', to ban the sport, not a measured discussion about glove weight, or rugby rules being tweaked to make head injuries less likely.

In isolation, there is little doubt that wearing a helmet can save you from certain injuries in specific situations and I have the personal anecdotal evidence to prove it without bothering to look at rigorous statistical research on large data sets. That's slightly tongue in cheek, but then again the 2 incidents in 40+ years of cycling where I didn't have to attend A&E after head impacts that resulted in severely damaged helmets leads me to be personally convinced of their merits but I'm not sure how those non A&E attendances get captured in any statistics, or how one could positively affirm that the helmet really did reduce, or in my case negate, any injury.

I can see where Hypoxic is coming from though, working in an environment where you deal with a lot of head trauma cases must give you an intrinsic understanding of the patterns of injury in classes of accidents and the differences in both injury and outcome between those wearing a helmet and those who were not. At an individual level of course such injuries can be catastrophic, life changing or life ending events and very emotive evidence for the pro helmet argument. But at the same time, those few seriously injured people are but one small overall statistical element of the wider debate.

As individuals we tend to think that we are good at assessing risk but we are usually just lucky than right. For example I know people who refuse to get on the back of a motorcycle yet ride horses and some who are terrified of flying yet think nothing of getting into a car and driving. It's even worse where the perceived risk is not sudden death. If we were good at understanding the harm of long term exposure threats to our wellbeing then no-one would smoke and pollution of the air we breath would certainly be higher on people's agenda of stuff that's actually worth worrying about. In the context of the cycling helmet debate there are clearly many social and personal benefits to encouraging cycling and for many reasons forcing people to wear a cycle helmet is a deal breaker for them not to use a bike. It may even be as vain as not wanting to mess up their hair (or is that just me?)

So should we be forced to wear a helmet at all times when in contact with a bicycle? If so then why not a full face motorcycle style affair? And a neck brace and a back protector, and gloves with carbon fibre knuckles and maybe fireproof underpants? Where does Nanny state stop and personal responsibility start? Is it more cost effective to provide 'safe' cycle infrastructure or to suffer the consequences of sedentary car centric transport choices for local journeys that could be walked or cycled?

I have no wish to see compulsory helmet laws in the UK, I think that there is much compelling evidence that having such legislation will result in a worse overall outcome for society. It's a harder and far less engaging, dry statistical debate to have. But at the same time I don't think trying to claim they are ineffective is going to win any arguments, puts you in the same camp as those who claimed seat belts are more dangerous because "it's safer to be thrown clear in an accident".

So Hypoxic. Why don't you wear a helmet when driving? It's a serious question.
Surely vast majority of patients with serious head injuries that you deal with are car occupants not cyclists, right?

What is wrong with these anti-helmet fanatics?

How can they doubt that a SNEL certified helmet, or the lower CE rating, containing roughly 400 grammes of expanded polystyrene, will protect them in a collision with objects weighing 2,500 kilogrammes travelling at 10 to 12 metres per second?

What I don't get is, that IF helmets work and Australia is light years ahead in regards to cycling why does Hypoxic drive his youngsters to school. And why does he only commute 20% of the time. I know he highlights weather and work obligations. But. Here in the UK I think our weather is a tad s******y than Oz yet I manage to cycle to work all year round. I also do shift work and this doesn't prevent me being on the road at 4am or 10pm going to work. And I would ask him the question. does he drive his children to work because of the piss poor infrastructure and even more piss poor attitude of motorists towards cyclists. Or is it because their school is too far to walk or cycle to?

rather than biting the bullet like the Dutch did in the 70's and investing. And when I say investing I really do mean investing in infrastructure, laws etc to create an environment where the more vulnerable road user is actually safe and the urban streets are given back to the pedestrian and cyclist. Sadly, many countries  would rather paint a white line and pressurise folk to wear hi viz and helmets as their statement of cycling investment. When in fact they should be  tackling the problem of distracted motorists with no concept of speed awareness and the consequences of their vehicle hitting a human being at 40mph plus.  It is only when infrastructure and motorist attitudes is addressed that people will feel more confident to return to streets which were in fact designed for them in the first place. 

Since when does being an anaesthetist make someone an expert on the sociology and politics of transport? I just don't get that, its the oddest appeal to authority since Rose O'Donnel claimed that being a mother gave her special expertise on how to deal with the Taliban.

If Australia is 'light years ahead', how come its doing so appallingly badly on active travel and obesity?

(could it be because some seem to think someone travelling to work in an office or a child travelling to school should be regarded as something akin to working on a construction site?)

I'm the owner of http://www.cycle-helmets.com

Yes and as explained on the VISTA page, Melbourne's increase in cycling since pre-helmet law is entirely due to the inner city high density population boom. In the middle to outer suburbs and in regional Victoria, pre and post law cycling participation is a disaster.

Hypoxic, I'm a rational thinker who believes in data rather than opinion and I think you should reconsider your somewhat arrogant "I'm a doctor" abuse when discussing one of the most critical public health and safety issues in Australia. Look at the facts instead of calling for censorship of government survey data.

With bike helmet laws, Australia is 25 years rather than light years ahead of the UK and almost all other countries. It'll be 35 years, 45 years, 55 years, etc, because the other countries have seen the damage caused by Australia's helmet legislation and chosen not to harm their citizens. More jurisdictions have repealed than enacted adult helmet laws over the past decade.

Your belief that it doesn't make sense for helmets to discourage cycling because it's the same as making sure your bike tyres aren't flat is ... well, that's not very rational thinking. 

I suggest you follow the links and read all the data on my site ... it'll take a day or two but that's what research is all about.

I recommend you look at http://www.cycle-helmets.com/cycling-1985-2015.html where you can check the pre-law 1985/86 survey data compared to results from the 2015 National Cycling Participation (NCP) survey in all Australian states.

I've just done an update on the 1985/86 comparison using the latest single year of age population estimates from the ABS for 2015 ... http://www.cycle-helmets.com/ncp-2015.html

Australian cyclist numbers have been recovering from the helmet law collapse since about the year 2000 but that recovery has now stalled because, after 25 years, the discouraged kids are growing into adults and not replacing the ageing baby boomers who learnt to love cycling before helmet laws. There's no point arguing with or abusing me because it's the NCP authors who concede Australian cycling has declined since 2011 and predict that worse is to come.

While doing your research, you might like to read http://www.cycle-helmets.com/perth-cycling-participation.html which compares pre-law and 2015 cycling participation figures in Perth and WA. This page includes the results of a 1985/86 and 1989 ABS cycling survey in WA so you can compare 2015 participation with two different pre-law analyses.

Keeping participation in mind, you should also consider the cyclist injury pages. Yes, there was a reduction in head injuries but total injuries per cyclist increased and the head injury decline wasn't as great as the participation decline. The huge reduction in people enjoying regular recreational cycling exercise was and is a massive setback in one of the world's most obese countries. Furthermore, less cyclists = more motorists = more traffic congestion = more car crashes. 

It still amazes me that Australia's medical community remains in denial about cycling participation and/or doesn't give a damn about the harm being caused to Australian public health and road safety.

25 years on and the obesity crisis is now costing our health system way more than ever per taxpayer. How did that culture change? Riding a bike to school, shopping, or for convenience has been replaced with Lycra hard core enthusiasts who represent the cycling community and lobby for rules relevant to their style of bike use. The remaining silent majority have since gotten old and have been replaced with a generation of youth with indifference to cycling and rely on mum's taxi instead. End of rant.