THERE has been a lot of strange and poorly informed debate about cycling in Canberra lately so I feel that, as a cyclist who also owns a car (as most of us do), it’s worth unpacking some of the issues.
Some in the community question why cycling is a good thing that we should try and encourage.
For a start, road damage is a square power function of weight. Bicycles weighing around 100kg with rider can trundle along roads for centuries without the need for roadworks.
Also, with fossil fuels a finite resource every kilometre travelled by a cyclist is freeing up those fuels for a driver.
Inner-city parking space is limited, so again cyclists free parking spaces for motorists.
To the intelligent motorist, every cyclist is the best friend they’ve ever had!
As a society that provides health care there is then the issue that cyclists are getting exercise that, in the long run, frees up hospital beds and doctors’ appointments.
For every citizen who can be convinced to ride a bicycle rather than drive there are huge benefits to the government and the community as a whole.
Small tweaks to infrastructure and regulation that encourage cycling are therefore something sane governments view as a good idea.
Having said that, the proposal last week, packaged in a road safety strategy aiming for zero road deaths, to end mandatory bike helmet wearing was strikingly ludicrous.
Mandatory bike helmet laws save lives. Ending those laws will kill someone. We just don’t know who yet.
I will concede there’s little as pleasant as riding along with the wind in your hair.
But roads are hard and heads are fragile and, of the bike crashes I’ve been involved in, at least half have involved my head.
Which makes this a really interesting public policy debate, once we discard the “Vision Zero” part of the road-safety strategy.
Do the lives spared obesity, by encouraging cycling, balance those lost to head injury?
Particularly when the obesity lives are extremely hypothetical whereas the road injury lives are very real and certain?
I grumbled when the helmet laws came in but, like most other cyclists, I learned to leave the helmet hooked over the handlebars when storing the bike, and I can think of only one time the helmet law pushed me to drive a car rather than ride.
Now the issue that one time was I’d done my hair and didn’t want to mess it up with a helmet. Other people care more about that sort of thing than I do.
One hopes that the drive for organ donors has had nothing to do with this policy direction.
Advances in car safety have really cut into donor numbers. Before airbags, crumple zones, seat belts and collapsible steering wheels, the roads provided a steady stream of healthy young organs.
Increasing head-trauma road fatalities through relaxed helmet laws would certainly provide an improved supply of donor organs. Doubly so when those lives are being traded off against the obese.
It’s not a pretty thought.
On a happier note, aside from the above listed benefits to society as a whole of cycling, let me remind the reader of the personal benefits.
Parking costs nothing, there’s no petrol to pay for, you can save on a gym membership and it’s often faster than driving through a traffic jam, finding a park and walking from the car park to work.
Lastly it’s fun. Even with a helmet on.
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