Legislators who have noticed that the accident rate among bicyclists is going up are concerned for the safety of the cycling community. To lower the death rate, they intend to pass legislation to force bicyclists to wear helmets. I ride my bicycle to work every day, and I normally wear a helmet. Since this policy aims to protect the safety of riders, I should be all in favor of it. However, as I see it, forcing people to wear a helmet is a different matter.
If bicycle safety focuses on the helmet issue, we could easily come to ignore other issues that are more important, such as teaching cyclists to avoid being hit by cars and other necessary measures.
Based on my several decades of cycling experience, inappropriate driving by car and motor scooter drivers is the main killer of cyclists, and helmets are of no use when it comes to reducing such accidents.
Unfortunately, people mistakenly assume that wearing a helmet equals safe cycling, or even that wearing a helmet is the only safety measure to take.
Bicycle helmets do not necessarily bring about safe cycling, and they might have the opposite effect. In the US prior to the 1990s, almost no one riding a bicycle wore a helmet, but beginning in the 1990s, wearing helmets became popular. This could have been expected to lead to a drop in the number of head injuries among cyclists, but in fact the opposite occurred.
A report in the New York Times several years ago said that the big increase in bicycle helmet use in the 1990s led to a 51 percent increase of head injuries among cyclists.
I have often heard it said that a research report found that wearing a helmet when biking diminishes the risk of sustaining a head injury by 85 percent. This statistic is frequently quoted in many countries when people are pushing for the use of bicycle helmets. However, a more careful analysis of this report reveals several flaws.
For example, not one single example used in the report includes cyclists hit by cars or scooters. If the government continues to push for the forced used of helmets, it would be well worth further investigating the assumptions and limitations behind the data used in the government’s proposals.
The government should pay special attention to another piece of information if it is to push for forced helmet use. In some countries where bicycles are most common, such as the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Finland, France and the UK, the countries where helmet use is the highest are also the countries that rank the highest in cyclist head injuries. In the countries where helmet use is the lowest, the number of head injuries is also the lowest. In addition, a study from the University of Bath in the UK shows that car drivers tend to drive closer to cyclists wearing bicycle helmets.
Data from other countries show that most cyclists who have sustained serious injuries have done so after violating traffic regulations. These accidents could easily have been avoided.
For example, a study by Riley Geary of the Institute for Traffic Safety Analysis in the US shows that nighttime cycling is the main cause of bicycle fatalities among adults.
In Taiwan, very few people have the right lights on their bicycles. Someone who really cares about the safety of cyclists would do more by requiring the use of appropriate lighting before focusing on the helmet issue.
Furthermore, the helmets on the market at present are designed to handle only the lightest impact under some ideal conditions — they are not designed to cope with a car slamming into a cyclist, although that is the most common cause of biking fatalities.
The biggest problem with a bicycle helmet law is that it ignores some unexpected consequences. For example, if such a law were passed and enforced, many people could be expected to lose interest in cycling.
A report by the Bicycle Helmet Research Foundation in the US found that the cycling population fell between 31 percent and 50 percent in countries such as Australia and Canada after the passage of bicycle helmet legislation. As a consequence, there will be fewer bicycles on the streets, making it more likely that car and scooter drivers will ignore cyclists more than they already do, so the danger to cyclists will increase. This is also reflected in studies showing that the countries with the highest number of cyclists also have the lowest number of injuries.
Whether we look at relieving traffic pressure or take an environmental and energy saving perspective, Taiwan would do well to promote cycling. The things that those who really care about the safety of cyclists should give priority to include offering bicycle safety classes to students and others, passing regulations stipulating safe distances when overtaking bicycles on the road, providing a minimum amount of road space for cyclists and implementing traffic regulations suitable to bicycles.
Hua Jian is a professor at National Taiwan Ocean University.
TRANSLATED BY PERRY SVENSSON
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