Australian Helmet Laws Lock Young Families Out of Active Travel

Hey we just had a baby! And Adelaide weather is coming into a glorious Spring! Time to get out into the sunshine and explore on bikes, right?

WRONG!

Australia has some of the most punitive mandatory helmet laws around. Since 1990 it's been illegal to ride on the road, footpaths or shared paths without a helmet. Now I'm not here today to argue we should scrap helmet laws altogether (though the evidence is they don't make cycling safer). Instead, I want to focus on something much simpler:

NEWBORN BABIES CAN'T WEAR HELMETS!

Newborn babies don't have the neck strength to support the weight of a helmet. In addition, nobody is making helmets for young babies.

SA's helmet laws are very clear:

• (2) The rider of a bicycle must wear an approved bicycle helmet securely fitted and fastened on the rider's head, unless the rider is exempt from wearing a bicycle helmet under another law of this jurisdiction.
• (3) The rider of a bicycle must not ride with a passenger on the bicycle unless the passenger complies with subrule (2).

There isn't any wiggle room there. The rider and all passengers must be wearing a helmet. Australia's mandatory helmet laws prevent new families from taking up active travel, forcing them into the car.

This is a problem for a number of reasons. Financially, any new parent must have a car to transport their baby around, and cars are expensive. You can go from comfortably getting around by bike and then you are quite literally stuck at home unless you have a car.

Cars are terrible for the environment, our health, and our built environment. We need to be doing everything we can to provide alternatives to driving to make our places better and help with the climate crisis.

BUT DON'T YOU WANT YOUR BABY TO BE SAFE?!

Well yes, of course. Newborn babies need to be protected, and there is one neat trick we've figured out for cars, that also applies to bikes: the baby capsule.

Newborn babies travelling in cars need to be in an approved baby capsule or car seat. The capsule is designed to protect vulnerable babies in the event of a crash. Needless to say, the energies involved in a car crash are orders of magnitudes greater than on a bicycle.

Cargo Bikes Support Baby Capsules

Cargo Bikes allow you to transport babies in the same secure capsules as we do for cars. Our Gazelle Cabby came with mounts to fit popular Maxi Cosi baby capsules, and most cargo bike manufactures have similar options for travelling with young babies.

Now I'm fairly sure this is just a case of our helmet laws being out of date. I bet none of the people involved in drafting the legislation in 1990 had ever contemplated a cargo bike designed for moving families. Right now we have a situation where a baby travelling in a capsule at 110km/hour is fine, but a baby travelling in that same capsule at 20km/hour on a bike is illegal.

We could easily rectify this issue, even if we aren't ready to drop mandatory helmet laws, by amending the legislation to something like:

• The rider of a bicycle must not ride with a passenger on the bicycle unless the passenger complies with subrule (2), or is traveling in an approved child seat complying with AS/NZS 1754.

That would at least make it legal to safely transport babies by cargo bike, and we can have the bigger argument about mandatory helmet laws vs. safe infrastructure another day.

We still of course, need safe places for families to ride. Even in a baby capsule, you probably don't want to be cycling with a newborn on Adelaide's main roads. A separated bike network is really the only way to make this an option for everyone. We are actually fairly lucky that we can cycle to heaps of places with fairly minimal travel on the roads.

As we move to a low-car future, we are going to have to come to terms with the fact that the people who stand to benefit most from bicycles aren't middle aged men in lycra, but mums with young kids. To realise this benefit, we need to provide safe places for people to ride, and amend our laws so that it's actually legal to get around by bike.