That is very true that helmets discourage cycling. My kids don’t want to cycle if they have to wear a helmet.

The lack of support for cycling in this country is shocking. Take for example our kids high school. There is NO bicycle parking at the school. ZERO. Result? There is a traffic jam every day around the school during times to pick up and drop kids. Some kids are becoming fat in their early teens. Parents have to rush home to pick up their kids from school. How clever is that?

There is no bicycle parking at the train station either. Many people drive their cars to the local train station. The 5 to 10 minutes trip could be done in the same time on a bicycle. This would reduce traffic jams. People who must buy a second car just to drive to the station could save thousands of dollars per year. How clever is that?

It’s sad to realise that most people wouldn’t even consider riding a bicycle because there is no bicycle path and they are forced to wear a helmet.

This policy has far greater costs (in terms of traffic jams, pollution, time wasted, health problems escalating into high medical costs) than the cost of providing a few bicycle paths. How clever is that?

Sue goes to trial tomorrow morning in Scone. I will be there to film it. if you are in NSW, please pjone the ABC and azk them to cover the story, at least on radio. Mike

I lived 15 years in the US, cycled to work in the snow and sun, rode with two friends over the Rockies from Denver, Colorado, to San Francisco. (about 3500kms, 2200 miles). I never wore a helmet. Most Americans choose to, but no US state mandates the wearing of helmets. California requires helmets for people under the age of 18. That’s it. You wanna ride, ride.

I lived in Australia from 1973 to 1987, all those years in Whyalla, S.A. South Australia is a disaster for cycling. In rural SA, no-one cycles. Worse than this, in SA country towns, you never see a PEDESTRIAN, except in the carparks, making their way into the mini malls. Cycling has disappeared from folk memory and experience.
The problems in SA are distance, frequent strong winds, fewer roads, brutal summers, an absence of cyclists on the roads, too brief a tradition of cycling before the arrival of cars which flattened all before them.

In the US, I would wisecrack with my friends, saying: “The US is a nation of rugged conformists.” Yet this is even more true of ‘God’s-own, Australia. The late Scottish journalist, James Cameron, said that Australia is the most urbanised country on earth.

What alarms me is the frightening lack of imagination here. Also an incipient authoritarianism both in the rule-making classes and in the cops. “Do what you’re told; it’s the law!” Well,… is it a good law?

The descendants of our founding colonisers are telling the descendants of convict settlers what to do, how to think, how to be upright and ‘loyal.’ That sort of instinctive authoritarianism is too deeply ingrained in the Australian psyche. Our horizons are too narrow, too local.
Glad you (and your daughter) are in the fight. I don’t wear a helmet either.

Milo.
What’s Sue Abbott’s situation? When is her trial?
Just had my first blog from Oz appear on Mikael’s C.C. Chic.

Perhaps something will happen, like a challenge at Copenhagen, where the Danes will surely will put bikes front and centre, to wake this Govt. up. The Rudd Govt. is clever, and potentially fantastic for bikes since they do zero in on things and get them done, like lap tops for all the kids in secondary school Mike

What about our children not riding bikes…
The government’s approach to the problems of society is mainly to solve the problems for people by introducing policies. It is good sometimes, but it does not have to be as overwhelming as it is in Australia.
Dutch people are independent, and prefer to manage their problems themselves, and do not take unnecessary government’s expenses as easily as it happens here. Employing school bus drivers and hiring those buses is a huge expenditure Dutch people do not want to have. Building and maintaining bike lines (which serve as pedestrian lines as well) is much cheaper and much more efficient (as I heard – never saw the actual figures).
School bus system provides a lesson of inefficiency which lasts for 12 years. School lessons are over at 15.05 but buses can arrive even around 16.30. All this time children sit and wait doing nothing productive or interesting, becoming mischievous and driving supervising teachers mad. A few teachers are obliged to spend unpaid hours waiting for the buses every day. On my memory the latest bus arrived something like 5.45 pm (something happened in the bus depot) – I was never reimbursed for the wasted hours (because it is expected that we are happy to sacrifice our time to the government), and our children are never reimbursed for this incredible waist of time. In those years of pointless waiting they learn to sit, to be bored to death, instead of moving around, being active and being in charge of their own life. In Holland children in childcare centres are taught to be responsible on the roads and to know how to be a pedestrian and a driver(rider). In Australia we stop or slow down all traffic in the country to make sure that no child ends up under the car, and we even regulate which types of vehicles are allowed around schools and which are not.
In Holland they anticipate that the children will take responsibility for their behaviour, here we anticipate that the child will be taken care of.
Maybe this passive attitude we develop in our children is a contributing factor to the lack of bike culture?

The Dutch story, as I’ve heard it, is that in the 70′s they had some terrible accidents with kids and bike. it presented a fork in the road, whether to to busing like outer countries of whether to make cycling safe by building bike ways. Lucky for them the choose the latter.

For everything about bikes in Holland, go to David Hembrow’s blog, Beside the Cycle Path, linked on my blog. he’s a wealth of info.

I read somewhere that the Dutch would have not had such an extensive network of cycle paths today had it not been for parents. Parents wanted their children to bicycle to school, and they wanted it to be done safely. So they banded together, agitated for change, and made it happen. The power of parents is not to be trifled with!

I wonder whether those oh-so-chic European riders see themselves as part of a bicycle culture. Somehow I don’t think so, or at least no more so than a person who walks to work or the store sees himself or herself as part of a walking culture. For them, cycling is no more or less than an artifact of daily life, and perhaps all the more precious because it is so unremarkable.