Dorre

Cycling for transport

I discovered the convenience, health benefits and joys of cycling for transport at the age of 17 and have actively campaigned for improved facilities for cyclists. I have also experienced first hand the reduced cycling, reduced safety in numbers, and reduced interest in creating a safe environment for cyclists after helmet laws were introduced in Australia. Although this could be considered a conflict of interest when editing pages related to bicycles, helmets and cycling in Australia, I believe that this is more than outweighed by the time I have spent reading and understanding the statistics and research reports on this subject.

My interest in bicycle helmet laws led to an invitation to serve on the editorial board of the Bicycle helmet Research Foundation. I helped write some of the peer-reviewed articles on the BHRF website and some of the graphs that appear in those peer-reviewed publications have been made available via Wiki commons. These include the graphs published in Changes in cycle use in Australia and the graph (drawn from data supplied by Bruce Robinson and Delia Hendrie) of the percentages of hospital admissions involving head injury for all road users in Western Australia from 1971 to 1999.

Australian census data on walking to work, averaged over states with and without enforced bicycle helmet laws in the 1991 census

Australian census data on cycling to work, averaged over states with and without enforced bicycle helmet laws in the 1991 census

Also of interest are census data on cycling to work, comparing pedestrian and cycling journeys. Because some states introduced and enforced helmet laws before the 1991 census (shown by dotted lines between 1986 and 1991) and others after 1991 (dotted lines between 1991 and 1996), the census data provides a natural experiment comparing the decrease in cycling to work, aggregated over all states with had enforced helmet laws in 1991, compared to the increasing trend in other states. There is no such change for walking to work, suggesting that (along with the information cited at Changes in cycle use in Australia) helmet laws may have been instrumental in the divergent trends for cyclists compared to pedestrians.

Another interesting comparison is the difference between capital cities (which generally have higher traffic levels) and regional areas such as small country towns, with less traffic and shorter distances between home and work. Before helmet legislation in 1986, capital cities had similar numbers (43,218 vs 40,798 in regional/rural areas) cycling to work but much lower percentages (1.14% compared to 3.14%).