The helmet mandate… Important or just another product of BIG CAR?
The importance of framing in the construction of public policy
Before I begin, I would like to clarify that this is not an anti-helmet article. It is rather, a brief exploration of Australian cycling and transport culture and a Bacchi-esque interrogation of one of our key solutions to the problem of bicycle safety.
If you’ve lived in Australia for a while, you have probably heard the term “nanny state” chucked about when people talk about our policies. My friends and I certainly joke about it on a semi-regular basis, but it was not until I went to Europe for my exchange last semester that I began to understand the extent to which Australia’s laws and regulations are designed to keep us safe at every corner. It’s like we are in a big cushioned fortress; which definitely has its benefits. Some key differences were the relatively relaxed road rules and much looser laws on alcohol sale and consumption. However, one that I was most shocked by (perhaps weirdly), was the lack of compulsory helmet legislation.
I became a regular user of the Swiss version of our late CityCycle (RIP) but having grown up with helmet safety ingrained into me, felt quite unsafe every time I would ride, as helmets weren’t provided with these bikes. Lowkey, I thought I was going to die or at least get gravely injured. However, when I expressed this concern to my European friends (particularly the Dutch one), they laughed at me and told me that,
“no one wears helmets anyway”
Apparently, they’re uncool.
Feeling unsatisfied, I sought the advice of a second cousin who lives in Switzerland. Being in his late thirties with a child, he is both wise and sensible. I fully expected him to validate my concerns and tell me that I was right, the Europeans are silly to not have bicycle helmet mandates. Instead he told me that we Australians are the unsafe ones; we don’t have good enough bike infrastructure, which forces cyclists to wear helmets as a necessary defence against the dangers of car-oriented roads and cities. He told me that our insistence on the onus of cycling safety being on the cyclist themselves, is part of a culture in which cyclists are forced to defend themselves from the dangers of the roads and its natural rulers — CARS.
As policy scholar Carol Bacchi would say… What is the problem represented to be?
I previously mentioned my Dutch friend’s amusement at my helmet concerns. Through further research however, her relative lack of concern makes total sense, as she comes from a transport culture on the opposite end of the spectrum to ours. The Netherlands has the highest cycling rates of any country in the world and in 2022 their citizens cycled on average 4.2 times per week. More than ¼ of all trips in the Netherlands are made by bicycle. You might then find it shocking that in the Netherlands helmets are almost non-existent. This is largely attributed to their highly bike-friendly cities that prioritise cyclist safety over the car supremacy of countries like Australia, the USA and the UK. Because of this prioritisation of bicycle safety, people in the Netherlands generally feel as though they do not need to wear a helmet because they are safe enough without one. This situation is mirrored in Denmark, another country with one of the highest rates of cycling and the highest ranked cycling safety infrastructure in the world, yet one of the lowest rates of helmet use. It seems that without having to worry about cars, the commute to work on a bike is just not dangerous enough to warrant a helmet.
So… are we the ones with a problem? And, as policy scholar Carol Bacchi would say… What is the problem represented to be?
Some disclaimers before I further this investigation…
Obviously, in many contexts, bike helmets are highly beneficial and do provide protection to the skull and brain from impacts. Helmets are particularly important in contexts such as racing, mountain biking and at other times when head trauma risk is amplified above the usual. They can also be highly beneficial to children whose brains and skulls are still developing and are more susceptible to damage. A major Australian review of 40 different studies and 64,000 injured cyclists worldwide showed wearing a bicycle helmet reduces the risk of serious head injury by nearly 70%. Despite this, helmets are designed and tested to protect the brain and skull in an impact with the ground, which will almost always occur at much slower speeds than an impact with a solid object or a moving one such as a car. In the USA, the standard bike helmet is tested at a speed of only 22.5km/h. Therefore, when protecting against regular cycling hazards, helmets are important. When protecting against car collisions, however, they are much less likely to be effective. This is not what they are built for.
Cycling is a very healthy and environmentally friendly method of transportation. Increased cycling rates boost the overall efficiency of roads by removing cars and their congestion, whilst simultaneously reducing the transport related carbon emissions in a city. Cycling is a clean, green, inexpensive method of transport that is beneficial to both people and communities for many reasons. Therefore an underlying assumption of this article is that increases in cycling participation will generally have a positive effect on the community, transport, health, and broader environment.
So, it seems we have two approaches when looking to improve cyclist safety: protecting cyclists against the existing dangers (through helmets or other protective measures), or the creation of safer cycling environments which increase the accessibility and ease of cycling, and enables cyclists to ride helmet-free (should they desire to). So far, Australia has prioritised the first approach, with comparatively mild and slow developments in the second. How has this worked out for us?
By donning a helmet, cyclists may actually be exposing themselves to greater likelihood of crash or collision than without.
Some articles claim that the 1991 mandatory helmet laws oversaw a 30 to 40 per cent decline in the number of people cycling in Australia. However, a 2016 comprehensive Senate committee review of this issue found that there was not enough good quality data to know if the laws of the 1990s affected cycling participation in Australia. It is therefore difficult to conclusively say how much these laws affected cycling in Australia, but the general consensus is that it significantly reduced participation.
Another issue which has appeared and is consistent with issues found in other places that introduce mandatory helmet laws, is that there are consistent geographical and racial disparities in the policing and number of penalties issued. In New South Wales (NSW) in 2018–19, nearly half of all fines issued were issued in only 12 of the 117 local government areas (LGAs), with Blacktown (one of the poorest LGAs in NSW) receiving 12% of the total. The fact that this law is disproportionately affecting lower income groups is particularly problematic when one considers that cycling is generally a much lower-cost alternative to driving. The real costs of this policy are therefore not immediately visible, and this research shows that it could in fact be counterproductive in addressing the real issue of car dependency.
In addition, a 2018 study of helmet use and cyclist risk levels revealed a strong positive correlation between the usage of a helmet and engagement in risky behaviours. The perceived sense of additional safety that cyclists can feel through the use of a helmet can in fact produce an opposite effect and increase their likelihood of injury.
Similarly, when cyclists wear helmets, drivers also perceive them as being less vulnerable to injury. A study conducted by the University of Bath found that on average, cars passed cyclists with helmets 8.5cm closer than those without. These combined factors mean that by donning a helmet, cyclists may actually be exposing themselves to greater likelihood of crash or collision than without, as both drivers and the cyclists themselves, perceive the cyclist to be much safer than they are.
So, with this in mind, what is the problem represented to be?And what is the problem that we, as Australians, feel is of higher priority? When helmets, or other cyclist centric policies are chosen as the solution, it puts the burden of responsibility for safety on the roads onto the cyclist, thus presenting them as the problem. This idea of the cyclist being a problem and an intruder to the car’s road is probably not unfamiliar to Australians.
In contrast, when cyclists are not wearing safety gear such as helmets, the burden of responsibility is on the car and the infrastructure in the city to provide a safe cycling environment for them.
This idea that it could be the car’s responsibility to make way for cyclists is foreign to us, however it is only in the last century or so that cars have risen to the position of superiority that they now hold. The Australian cities started off as walking cities before merging into tram and train-based cities. It is only since the 1940s that our cities and towns shifted away from these forms of transport and grew into our current sprawling masses of suburbia only penetrable by cars.
So, could the real problem be the apparent chokehold that cars have over Australian culture? I think by now it is clear that I am not advocating for the abolishment of Australia’s helmet mandate by any means. As previously stated, there are many contexts in which they are very effective. Instead, I am arguing that Australia perhaps requires a reframing of their perspective of the helmet debate and more widely, the transport debate.
Much of Europe cycles a lot more than Australia, yet they don’t enforce and rarely wear helmets because they frame cars as dangerous to cyclists, rather than prioritising cars and framing cycling as dangerous.This should make us critically reflect on whether we’ve framed the problem correctly, and inform how we shape our infrastructure moving forward.
That being said, the issue of Australia’s transport system is highly complex. We face a lot of barriers to transport that European countries do not, we have a relatively small population spread across a similarly sized area which reduces the ability of many people to cycle in their everyday life. But then again, increases in cycle infrastructure could make 10 times more people able to access the public transport hubs and stops currently in place.
Clearly our infrastructure can not be changed overnight and we should not throw away our helmets. Nonetheless, it is important to consider whether our policies are solving the right problem, or if we are simply putting a bandaid on the true problem of car dependency.
For further reading on the topic of car dependency in Australia, you might be interested in:
This article was written by Phoebe Meyer Elks , a UQ PPE student in her fourth year. Her interest in policy problem framing inspired this article, her first for Statecraft Magazine.
Thanks to Eloise Taylor and Clancy Mcmahon for editing this piece.
