Are Compulsory Helmet Laws Effective?

Last year I read a book by Tom Vanderbilt called Traffic which indicated that cyclists wearing helmets made them less safe, not more. Vanderbilt's thesis was that car drivers tended to travel closer to helmet-wearing cyclists, while giving a wider berth to the unprotected. Implicitly, this put helmet wearers at greater risk.

I had not previously questioned Australia's mandatary helmet laws. Instinctively, it just seemed the right thing to do to put on a helmet. On reading that book, I started to wonder whether the compulsory helmet legislation was automatically a good thing. Around the same time, there appeared to be a groundswell of opinion challenging them, notably in the case of Melbourne's new bike rental scheme, which was failing miserably due to these laws.

This year I fell off my bike and landed on my head. Let's just say that my anecdotal evidence came to outweigh Vanderbilt's empirical evidence.

Now new research published in the Age indicates that modern helmets are nowhere near as effective as the helmets that were around when the legislation was brought in. Again, this casts doubt on whether the legislation actually achieves what it sets out to do - protect cyclists from harm.

Very few countries have such laws in any form. The rest of the world seems to get along just fine without them, and do not seem inclined to follow our lead. Indeed some of the safest countries in the world for cyclists, such as Denmark and the Netherlands, do not have helmet laws and cyclists rarely wear them. The key factor in their safety appears not to be helmets, but the fact that there are large numbers of cyclists in those countries, so car drivers are more accepting of them. There is safety in numbers.

Unlike the case for, say, seat belts, it appears that the science supporting the helmet laws is far from clear. It's a good question whether the State should be mandating that we do things for our own good when the evidence that they work is highly contestable.

I think my view would now be that compulsory helmet legislation is not a good idea, because people ought to be allowed to decide for themselves when the evidence is so unclear. And, personally, my decision would be to never, ever ride without a helmet.