Jersey's compulsory cycle helmet law: based on emotion, not evidence?
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Version 0 of 1. For UK cyclists the issue of compulsory helmet use has been until now, to use the phrase, a quarrel in a faraway land, with the main proponents being Australia, New Zealand and parts of Canada and the US. But now it has arrived on our shores. Earlier this month all children aged under 14 on the Channel Island of Jersey who ride a bike without a helmet risk a £50 fine for their parents. The law has been progressing for a long time, first mooted in 2010 covering all cyclists. If it’s fair to say that most cycling issues generate a vigorous debate, and helmet compulsion is perhaps the most vexed and passionately argued of all. I’ll be plain from the start: I wear a helmet most of the time while on a bike. Even so, I think compulsion is foolishness for a series of interconnected reasons, not least that there’s quite good evidence that the net effect on public health is negative as activity levels fall. I also worry there is an increasingly vocal and powerful lobby in this country pushing for cycling to be treated as an inherently perilous pursuit with necessarily specialist equipment, which goes completely against the sort of transport culture which might actually get more people on their bikes. That’s why the arrival of helmet compulsion on the British Isles, albeit part of the British Isles with its own very distinct legal and legislative system, worries me so much. It’s a complex issue, and for that reason I’m deliberately ignoring the issue of whether helmets even offer any safety benefits in the first place. How it will work I was talked through the mechanics of the new law by Tristen Dodd, the island’s chief civil servant for transport matters. The legislation covers any bike of two wheels or more propelled by the rider’s own power, which, he confirms, includes young children’s balance bikes. It’s in force on any public route, taking in cycle paths, and tracks in parks, though not grassed areas, gardens or beaches. It will be enforced by honorary police, the island’s elected, unpaid law enforcers, who, Dodd notes, are community based so will generally know if a helmet-less 13-year-old is lying when he or she cheekily claims to be 15 and thus exempt. Those brought before the law will not face a court but a parish hall enquiry, the island’s relatively informal and community-based method of youth justice. Actual fines, says Dodd, will most likely be rare: “You’ll probably just get ticked off, to be honest with you. It’s the inconvenience of having to go down to the parish hall with your parents.” Dodd is a regular cyclist who confesses to being initially sceptical about the need for the law. He says his opinion was changed in part by what he sees as convincing medical evidence about the particular efficacy of helmets in protecting child cyclists, who generally fall off away from other traffic and at lower speeds. He says: The aim of the legislation is that if you can get children into the habit of wearing a helmet younger, that should say with them. But even Dodd refused to be drawn on whether he was certain the net public health benefit would prove to be positive: I wouldn’t say we’re confident. We’re going to have to look at the numbers and see. The man behind the law This is at heart a political decision and the primary mover is Andrew Green, a member of the States of Jersey, the island’s combined legislature and executive. He initially pushed for helmet compulsion for all cyclists but says he is happy with the eventual decision. Green has a slightly unusual response to the argument that helmet compulsion will curb cycling rates – he believes the law will actually get more people on bikes. This is, he says, based on anecdotal evidence: Those figures [about helmet compulsion hampering cyclist numbers] don’t stack up, and I’m even more confident when we’re talking about children. I can only talk from Jersey experience, but I believe children participating in cycling will increase after the law, based on the number of phone calls I’ve had from parents saying, ‘I want little Johnny to wear a helmet. He won’t wear it because his friends won’t wear one. Therefore I won’t let him have a bike.’ Following on from that Green is not worried about the law potentially causing more physical inactivity on Jersey, where around one in five 11-year-olds are overweight or obese: Frankly, I don’t think you can put that at the door of cycle helmets. That’s happening anyway. I think Jersey has a higher rate of activity participation. It’s not going to put people off. It’s only for children. The evidence I see is that more children will cycle, based on what parents are saying. The evidence The problem with Green’s confidence is that, as far as I can tell, it’s simply not backed up by the evidence. Jersey’s scrutiny office, which looks into proposed legislation, commissioned a study by the Transport Research Laboratory (TRL), an agency hived off from the Department for Transport in 1996. TRL’s eventual 50-page report, a review of the existing literature rather than original research, is interesting for two reasons. To begin with, it offers none of the certainty voiced by Green and others. Throughout the report the authors stress that much of the evidence, particularly with regards to whether helmet compulsion affects cycle use and the eventual net public health benefit, is mixed and contradictory. Secondly – and this is slightly curious for a group so well-respected as TRL – the conclusions don’t entirely make sense. The study concludes that helmet compulsion “can be expected to have a beneficial effect on the injury rates”. But as the Beyond the Kerb cycling blog points out in far more detail than I can here, TRL offers no evidence to support this. Helmet use for children in Jersey is already 84%, while the only casualty data offered in the report, for 2013, showed that precisely zero under 14s were seriously injured on bikes. Any public health gain seems so marginal as to be effectively zero. Similarly, after many paragraphs noting the difficulties of assessing whether helmet laws affect cycling rates, the TRL report concludes that the new law “seems unlikely to have a major impact on cycling activity in Jersey”. Maybe I’m missing something, but the report doesn’t seem to offer any convincing evidence for this at all. Much of the relevant evidence comes from Australia, which saw bike use plummet in the wake of helmet compulsion in the early 1990s. Advocates of the law insist this was just a temporary blip. However, even Terry Mulder, minister for roads in the Australian state of Victoria, notes in his evidence to Jersey’s scrutiny office that overall bike use fell in the country between 1986 and 2010. He puts this down to “social trends” other than helmet compulsion. Others might disagree. The vested interests Aside from the sheer lack of decent evidence that this law will achieve anything, I have two big worries about Jersey’s decision. The first is how it illustrates the rise of what could be termed the “If it saves just one life it’s worth it” contingent. It’s a deeply sensitive area but quite often such people have a personal experience of a cycling-connected brain injury and are understandably, but to my mind still wrongly, now advocate compulsory helmet use, often using highly emotive arguments. A classic example is this Daily Telegraph comment piece by Beverley Turner, the wife of the rower James Cracknell, who suffered a serious brain injury when the mirror of a speeding lorry struck his head as he cycled in the US in 2010. Here is a flavour: I don’t really care about the macho twits who duck in and out of city traffic wearing headphones but no helmet, without a thought for the mothers and girlfriends who will pick up their pieces. You could just as well write this, which would be equally crass but at least has more relevance for actual public health: I don’t really care about the lazy twits who duck in and out of fast food restaurants eating burgers but taking no exercise, without a thought for the wives and children who will pick up their pieces of their diabetes or stroke or heart attack. Andrew Green has his own very tragic and very personal connection to cycle helmets for children. His son, when he was nine, fell off a bike without a helmet and suffered a very significant brain injury. “He’ll never live independently,” Green told me. I can only imagine the pain and anguish this has caused, and it’s worth noting that whenever my son rides his balance bike he wears a helmet. My worry is that such a tragic, if very rare, personal history has been translated into public policy for all, without full consideration of the overall effect. Green, it should be noted, is the UK chair of Headway, a charity which does fantastic work with people who have suffered brain injuries but has now branched out, slightly controversially, as a vocal advocate of helmet compulsion for all cyclists. Green concedes his personal stake but says this was balanced by the views of the scrutiny panel. He is, to his credit, less emotive than the likes of Turner, although he did offer up this telling argument for the helmet law: If you just save one life, or save one life from being blighted, it’s worth it. The bigger picture To me Green’s quote encapsulates the second major worry about Jersey’s decision, that helmet compulsion laws tackle the problem of cycling safety from entirely the wrong approach. In countries where significant numbers of trips are made on two wheels, not the derisory 2% or so seen in Jersey, they keep cyclists safe not by draping them in helmets and high-vis but by providing safe, segregated cycling routes. This is relevant even for under 14s – they might not ride on the road very often in Jersey or the UK but children are a common sight on the bike lanes of the Netherlands and Denmark. Green argues that the issue of infrastructure is complementary, not competing: There is an argument for improving infrastructure for cyclists generally, but it’s not cheap and it doesn’t happen quickly, particularly on old roads where there’s not a lot of room to provide segregation. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t give up pushing. This pushing on infrastructure, however, seems to me a bit half-hearted, especially compared against the very vigorous shoves towards helmet compulsion. Jersey does do some things – it has 50 miles of designated green lanes, with 15mph speed limits for motorists – but cycling remains centred around leisure and tourism than everyday transport, a particular oddity on an island where you struggle to find a journey beyond 10 miles. Of an annual budget of about £630m the island spends £150,000 a year on “general pedestrian and cycle improvements”, according to Dodd, with another £500,000 on “village centre improvements”, some of which covers shared spaces, plus £2m over the next few years on new infrastructure linked to cycling. It’s all very well, but it’s never going to change much. So that’s where we are. On a small island where 20% of children are overweight and cycling would seem an obvious way to provide everyday exercise we have a legislature passing a measure which will, at very best, give no discernible public health benefit while giving youngsters and their parents the message that cycling is intrinsically unsafe. I just don’t think it makes sense. |