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news
Helmet Row (picture copyright Simon MacMichael)Professor likens anti-helmet advocates to climate change deniers
A professor at an Australian university has likened opponents of compulsory cycle helmet laws to “climate change deniers and the anti-vaccination groups” following publication of a study which claims that legislation introduced across the country almost three decades ago has resulted in cycling fatalities falling by almost half.
The study, conducted by researchers at NSW Sydney and published in the International Journal of Epidemiology, claims that the number of cyclists killed in road traffic collisions has fallen by 46 per cent since the legislation was brought in by the country’s eight states and territories between 1990 and 1992.
According to the study, "There were 1,144 cycling fatalities in the period 1990-2016 and, using the pre-legislation trajectory as a guide, our model estimates 2,476 cycling fatalities from 1990 to 2016 if bicycle helmet legislation had not been introduced."
Emeritus Professor Raphael Grzebieta of UNSW’s Transport and Road Safety (TARS) Research Centre, attacked what he termed an “ill-informed, small but vocal group of anti-helmet advocates who claim that the MHL has been a disaster for cycling in Australia.”
He said: “This is simply not true. These advocates are no different to the climate change deniers and the anti-vaccination groups and belong in that same category of people that do not believe in scientific evidence. It would not matter what you present to such people. They will always live in denial.”
The study’s lead author, Professor Jake Olivier of UNSW’s School of Mathematics and Statistics and Deputy Director of TARS, said: “There was an immediate 46 per cent reduction in the rate of cycling fatalities per 100,000 population following the introduction of bicycle helmet legislation in Australia,” he says.
“This decline has been maintained since 1990 and we estimate 1,332 fewer cycling fatalities associated with the introduction of bicycle helmet legislation to date.”
But he said that he did not expect opponents of mandatory helmet laws to change their views as a result of the research.
“It is one of those things where it has been repeated so many times that people just believe it to be true, and won’t question it because they’ve heard it so often,” Professor Olivier says.
“These are the people who have made calls to repeal or weaken bicycle helmet legislation in Australia. The results from this study are not supportive of those initiatives.”
Professor Grzebieta added: “If Australian helmet laws were repealed there would be a sudden uptake in the rate of serious head injuries and fatalities among cyclists involved in a crash.
“The subsequent increase in hospitalisation costs would further exacerbate the already overwhelming demand for crash trauma treatment at hospitals and cause a significant increase in health costs.”
The authors called for more segregated cycling infrastructure to be introduced in Australia, which the said was sorely lacking compared to some European countries – an appeal that will be seized upon by “anti-helmet advocates” who will point out that in places like the Netherlands and Denmark, helmet use is very low yet they are the safest countries for cyclists.
Professor Olivier insisted that “this senseless focus on helmet legislation detracts from the more important concerns about construction of dedicated cycling infrastructure, education of all road users, and supportive legislation to protect cyclists, such as minimum passing distances”.
Organisations such as Cycling UK maintain that the effect on wider public health due to people being deterred from cycling by being made to wear a helmet outweighs any argument for legislation to make them compulsory being enacted.
But Professor Grzebieta rejected that argument, saying: “There are numerous claims that the benefits of cycling far outweigh the ‘disbenefit’ of introducing mandatory helmet laws.”
He added: “We are highly sceptical of this claim and suspect poor assumptions are being made in the scientific methodology.”
Previous research on the subject includes a 2010 study by Dr Chris Rissel of Sydney University’s School of Public Health, who maintained that levels of cycling had dropped by around 30 per cent in Australia since the helmet laws were brought in.
He also said that other factors were at work in bringing down the number of cyclist casualties, including the greater use of random breath-testing of motorists.
Simon joined road.cc as news editor in 2009 and is now the site’s community editor, acting as a link between the team producing the content and our readers. A law and languages graduate, published translator and former retail analyst, he has reported on issues as diverse as cycling-related court cases, anti-doping investigations, the latest developments in the bike industry and the sport’s biggest races. Now back in London full-time after 15 years living in Oxford and Cambridge, he loves cycling along the Thames but misses having his former riding buddy, Elodie the miniature schnauzer, in the basket in front of him.
Latest Comments
- stonojnr 37 min 5 sec ago
crazy that his own brief describes it as "his long suffering partner" also how come the two blokes he collected from the snooker club to assist in...
- stonojnr 45 min 13 sec ago
but in cases where you report other cyclists close passes, you literally are the witness to it, not the victim ?...
- S.E. 48 min 31 sec ago
1. It's obviously more aerodynamic, even a small backpack or hydration pack can help, there are studies about this....
- stonojnr 53 min 21 sec ago
theres an attitude I encounter alot locally, and demonstrated in bucket loads by drivers on my commute home tonight, that cyclists shouldnt be on...
- FionaJJ 1 hour 13 min ago
When I was a student it was virtually unheard of for someone to have a car. It wasn't even that it was considered a luxury that almost no-one could...
- Keesvant 2 hours 12 min ago
If the chains snap that is lack of build quality or material.....
- Hirsute 3 hours 8 min ago
"Wisdom is better than weapons of war, but one sinner destroys much good."
- Jaijai 3 hours 33 min ago
His life was only worth shy of 7 years ,that's too lenient in every book .Let alone drugged up and leaving him to die
- webbierwrex 3 hours 38 min ago
I came here to basically write the same thing, the floating bus stop near me has a very narrow cycling lane between a very narrow pavement and a...
- AS52 4 hours 1 min ago
It wasn't an official consultation meeting - see my comment above.
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45 comments
PS Hawkinspeter. How you liking NZ?
Fantastic weather and incredible scenery.
Mrs HawkinsPeter and I hired MTBs the other day and cycled half of the TimberTrail which was a lot of fun though we both almost crashed a couple of times by going faster downhill than our skills allow for (we both wore helmets but luckily didn't test their efficacy). The Mrs struggled on the ascents as well and was suffering after a few hours as she hasn't cycled for about 6 months. She was bemoaning the exercise when we hiked the Tongariro Alpine Crossing 2 days afterwards (and it was cloudy at the top so we couldn't see the best views).
She's bugging me to emigrate over here now on a daily basis.
that's a long way to emigrate on a daily basis.
Nice
I take it that it was great planning skills that got you here during the biggest heatwave in the last century. Seriously, our summers are not normally like this, but we're not complaining. The scenery is always like this though 
Wave as you pass through Levin
The wife did all the planning, so kudos to her.
Disingenuous, me?
Regardless of the rate of head injuries, if helmets can be shown to have a significant protective effect, then why should cyclists have mandatory helmets and not other groups? Where is the cut-off point that determines whether helmets should be mandated?
To be honest, I see cycle helmet laws as a method to pander to the motorists and give them more ammunition to bully cyclists off the road, so why not flip the argument around and call for mandatory car helmets?
I don't drive, but I don't wear a helmet as a car passenger either even though I wear a helmet whilst road cycling, but that's because my wife insists on it. I choose to wear a helmet when MTBing though as I'm more likely to hit my head due to poor skills and elevated confidence in my abilities.
Having ridden on Australian roads both before and after mandatory helmet laws I have seen a increase in the number of road riders over time. I know the helmet deniers say that it has decreased the number of riders but that isnt borne out by my experience.
I think the big issue missed by the study isn't the number of fatalities, it's the reduction of traumatic head inuries due to helmet use. These are hugely expensive to society as they can impact the rest of people's lives. I would expect that the number of traumatic head injuries without helmet use would be quite a lot higher than the number of fatalities.
BTW I guess it's obvious that I'm 100% in favour of forcing the wearing of helmets.
Unfortunately it's very easy to fool yourself with "experience" due to issues such as confirmation bias which is why we need more rigorous statistics than simply asking various people about population wide transport modes.
Also, your speculation about helmets and traumatic yet non-fatal head injuries misses out on the possible costs of reduced cycling i.e. heart disease, obesity, diabetes etc.
It's a complicated issue, but what I find to be remarkable is that people who are in favour of helmets usually don't consider them to be of any benefit to groups other than cyclists. This is especially bizarre as both motorists and pedestrians are more likely to suffer head injuries than cyclists.
So, as you do not specify the circumstances, I hereby assume that you are 100% in favour of forcing the wearing of helmets for everyone, all of the time (possibly excepting sleeping in bed, though bunk beds can be dangerous too).
That's a little disingenuous Squirrel man. You're guilty of just the same obfuscation being practised by the authors of the study.
The rate of traumatic head injuries in (non-helmeted) cyclists is higher than in car users either by active population, or by number of miles travelled, or by number of accidents. It is not unreasonable to offer head protection to those whose activity makes them more likely to suffer a traumatic (or any debilitating) head injury. Thus construction workers, horse riders, climbers, kayakers are all offered head protection. I believe that construction workers suffer lower rates of minor and moderate head injuries since the advent of mandatory helmet wearing. (almost certainly outhweighing the nebulous effect of risk compensation). I am of that group that is in favour of helmets (though not in favour of mandatory helmet wearing), and I consider that motorists would indeed be better portected if they rode around in motorcycle helmets with restraints (essential). However, I recognise that we have a social contract that we all accept some risk from our activities (Fluffy kitten excluded) and we all chose those levels of risk in any particular activity that we deem acceptable (hence you drive your car without a helmet, in spite of your assertion that it places you at far greater risk than on a bike).
I believe that wearing helmets is bad for the general population, bad for the cycling population, but probably beneficial to the individual. I believe that mandatory helmet wearing is bad for everyone. I believe that risk taking is an important part of a full life.
but the argument tonyw makes is essentially that compulsion is justified because it reduces the cost of treatment to the exchequer. Regardless of whether this is true or not [1], it means that the rate of injury is irrelevant because what matters is the absolute £ amount by which we could reduce the cost, and so the first priority for enforced protection should be the area where the highest savings are achievable [2].
my position is similar to yours. I think compulsion would be wrong even if it could be shown that cycle helmets (or whatever) were effective, whatever that means. That's because it's fuck all to do with the government, and because it's a slippery slope towards compulsion in other things because some bureaucrat thinks it's good for you, such as rugby, hang-gliding, rock climbing, smoking, drinking Malibu and pineapple, coffee after 6pm, watching 'enders while eating a tube of Pringles, boxing kangaroos, running with scissors, and all the other shit that makes life worth living.
But I am also against telling people not to wear them, as I am opposed to telling people not to wear a veil, for example, if they want to wear one.
[1] it's not.
[2] not cyclists.
His data is worthless because a negligable number of people cycle in Australia. It's even worse than here. What happens among that tiny group is not the point. What matters is the total morbidity rate among the entire population. What effect does a helmet-law have on that?
His faith in helmets sounds like sunlit-uplands, unicorn-believing Brexidiocy.
See, ad hominem attacks comparing people to entirely unrelated groups who have been proved to be laughingstocks are so easy.
Olivier makes one highly valid observation, which both sides of the helmet divide should take not of:
Professor Olivier insisted that “this senseless focus on helmet legislation detracts from the more important concerns about construction of dedicated cycling infrastructure, education of all road users, and supportive legislation to protect cyclists, such as minimum passing distances”.
You'll never put this argument to bed because people are arguing over different things.
On the one hand there is proving that helmets protect heads. On the other hand there are questions of whether wearing or not wearing a helmet represents the biggest factor in cyclist safety, whether the onous of protection in a collision lies with the cyclist absorbing the impact via a helmet, why cycling in particular is the focus for helmet wearing over other activities.
There must be a way to put this argument to bed.
Is there a way to get stats for cycling fatalities from head injuries and similarly data on serious head injuries from cycling. Would this data be available from hospital records?
If so, can we then compare those numbers against total cycling fatalities / serious injuries recorded (all causes). This will for one, outline how big a challenge cycling head injuries are in reality.
Then by comparing the ratio of recorded head injuries and recorded injuries of all type we could, in theory be able to see evidence of head injury reduction, if the ratio between total injuries and head injuries change in line with helmet usage.
The challenge in the UK, is corrolating helmet use... however in Australia, or other countries that have introduced helmet laws, we could in theory make a direct comparison.
Doing it this way negates other factors, such as overall cycling rates, and hopefully focuses on the actual differences made from helmet use.
Could this be made possible?
cyclehelmets.org
In short, no, there isn't a way to get those stats, becaue they were never collected, and those that were collected were collected with different parameters, so the best that study authors can do is make inferences from similar or associated data. And before you shoot that down as being pointless, or undermining the validity of any study, it is the way in which we gain understanding of many many things in our lives, which are then reinforced by practical application of the firm predictions made.
Back in 2013 David Spiegelhalter (Winton Prof. of Public Understanding of Risk at Cambridge University) and Ben Goldacre (epidemiologist, popular science writer specialising in debunking bad science and campaigner for quality of evidence and robust discussion of results in science) wrote an editorial in the BMJ that gave some detail about why helmet research is contradictory and, frankly, not nearly as good as the likes of Jake Olivier like to make out.
Check it out at https://www.badscience.net/2013/12/bicycle-helmets-and-the-law-a-perfect-teaching-case-for-epidemiology/
I've spent a lot of time looking at cycle helmet literature (I'm a clinical scientist with access to a research library) and I broadly concur with that editorial. The studies suggesting helmets are a big win are methodologically full of holes that render them more or less useless (the fact that good science is repeatable and they all come out with different values of Wonderful should be a clue), and the broader scale work seems to have more merit but is meaningless at the level of an individual (so we know enough to say we don't have good evidence to support a helmet law, but I can't say whether you would benefit from wearing a helmet).
The trouble with the whole debate is that the vehement opponents seem to get confused between the wearing of helmets (of which I am in favour) and the compulsory wearing of helmets (which I am against).
Opponents of what? If you mean opponents of compulsory helmet wearing, then, no, it isn't us that are confused, but the people who tell us we are anti-helmet, which we aren't; we're anti-compulsion, anti-fairy stories and anti-lies like this "research".
I don't usually post on helmet topics as they just go round and round, but you may not be anti-helmet, but a few regular posters are.
On a non-helmet thread I was called a 'plastic noddy hat wearing wanker' by one such poster. So they do exist (even if currently banned).
For the record I am anti-compulsion as are almost all the posters on this site. I expect there are few anti-helmet posters and few for compulsion. So in amongst all the sound and fury 90% of us have something we can agree on.
I'm not for compulsion, wear a helmet most of the time, but not always. If I pop to Tesco I'm not wearing one, but there are a few rabid commentators on this forum who take any mildly positive opinion of helmets as an attack. The Australia study is deeply flawed and biased, but it's very easy to apply confirmation bias if the response isn't measured. If they don't want compulsion smother it with reasonableness, not barking comments that paint the majority as pro-compulsion. Tell me you don't want to wear one, that is your choice. Don't tell me I am stupid for choosing to wear one, my head v concrete without one is an experiment I'd rather not perform.
There is research, findings, statistics and published views. The published views are always derived from the other areas and without seeing all of these it is difficult to agree or disagree with the comments of the professor. The Professor will no doubt have a personal opinion on this subject as well.
The findings are somewhat irrelevant when it is primarily the actions of motorists that injure cyclists. Therefore, I propose that we make motorists drive more safely by asking all manufacturers to fit a 300mm metal spike in the middle of steering wheels.
Here then, are two climate change deniers:
Ben Goldacre, Wellcome research fellow in epidemiology
David Spiegelhalter, Winton professor for the public understanding of risk
You can find their kind of stupidity here:
https://www.bmj.com/content/346/bmj.f3817
Their large point is not that helmets reduce death or not, but that it is excruciatingly hard to argue for either position given the statistics. There are not knock-out arguments.
That seems sensible. Where the authors of this report seem insensible.
And if I were given the authority, I could reduce the number of motor vehicle driver deaths to near zero IN ONE DAY by simply creating a new law where all motor vehicle users were required to carry a live African elephant with them at all times.
Because, of course, we all know African elephants save lives. It really is that simple.
A bit prejudiced; what's wrong with Indian elephants?
Speaking of which, do you know why African elephants have big ears?
Noddy won't pay the ransom.
I'll get my coat.
Statistically, an epidemiologist is more likely to be spouting misrepresented nonsense than a casual observer, especially if his livelihood depends upon publication. Most of the time, this does not matter because the only people who read epidemiological journals are other epidemiologists. Every now and then, one of their reports escapes into the wild, where it can find nowhere to hide from the predators who tear it apart.
Isn't it odd, but almost all the research showing massive benefits from mass helmet wearing come from either Australia or Seattle, and from people and institutions with a record of producing pro-helmet reports.
There appear to be so many holes in this particular report that it might be better used as a collander. Just using the quotes above should be sufficient to show the desperation and denial of facts;
"A professor at an Australian university has likened opponents of compulsory cycle helmet laws to “climate change deniers and the anti-vaccination groups”" Except that the evidence for and against cycle helmets has been examined by many eminent people who found no benefit, and much research shows the same, so totally unlike climate change and vaccination.
"Emeritus Professor Raphael Grzebieta of UNSW’s Transport and Road Safety (TARS) Research Centre, attacked what he termed an “ill-informed, small but vocal group of anti-helmet advocates who claim that the MHL has been a disaster for cycling in Australia.”" But the helmet promoters are, in many people's opinion, an ill-informed, small vocal group of helmet advocates, who ignore the fact that the MHL has been a disaster for Australia.
"It would not matter what you present to such people. They will always live in denial.” Which seems to fit the professor perfectly, and many other helmet promoters who ignore any evidence that contradicts their firmly held erroneous views.
"The study’s lead author, Professor Jake Olivier of UNSW’s School of Mathematics and Statistics and Deputy Director of TARS, said: “There was an immediate 46 per cent reduction in the rate of cycling fatalities per 100,000 population following the introduction of bicycle helmet legislation in Australia,” he says." So utterly misleading that only someone utterly blinkered would make it. Any reduction could have been caused by a reduction in the number of cyclists, and almost certainly was, but the good professor ignores that, claiming that a reduction in the number of fatalities was solely due to helmets. What qualifications do you need to be a professor in Australia?
“But he said that he did not expect opponents of mandatory helmet laws to change their views as a result of the research. “It is one of those things where it has been repeated so many times that people just believe it to be true, and won’t question it because they’ve heard it so often,” Professor Olivier says." And the good professor perfectly sums up his own position; utterly entrenched, a refusal to consider counter-vailing arguments, and ignoring the fact that the only reason helmets are seen as effective is the endless repetition of the lie that they are.
Professor Jake Olivier has a long history of publishing misleading helmet research; this is just another one.
Put another way, they come from countries who have proved to be completely crap at actually getting anyone to cycle. (Also some of the fattest countries in the world). It's like being lectured on safe-sex by the Pope.
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