The reality of the obesity argument is a long way from what these groups suggest. All their argument rests on surveys and studies suggesting / predicting that as soon as MHLs are repealed the masses will instantly begin cycling everywhere. The fact of the matter is, if you have a sedentary lifestyle with a bad diet you aren’t going to instantly have a massive lifestyle turnaround because you don’t have to wear a helmet. As soon as you ask for evidence of somewhere getting rid of helmets and the subsequent increase in taking up of cycling, weight loss, drop in heart disease etc it all goes strangely silent.

Because there is no central group to provide a voice for their advocacy little groups claim anything they like and it all becomes fanciful, one even claimed only days after the event that Jill Meagher was raped and murdered because police were too busy victimizing and fining cyclists. Needless to say that comment got removed fairly quickly. Catherine Deveny even gets in on the argument of helmet laws although a quick look on her website has a picture of her with a child on the back of her bike with a helmet on. Must be something in that whole helmet thing eh Catherine? They do have support politically from the Liberal Democrat Party though so you can vote to have the law repealed. Oh hang on that party also advocates a relaxing of laws in regards to the ownership of semi automatic and automatic weapons. They’re all up for a return to whaling as well. Awesome!

As far as statistics go each side rolls out various graphs, figures and pie charts that contradict each other completely and of course the old chestnut by anti MHL peeps is of course Amsterdam and Copenhagen. They’ve been trying to compare Australian cities to these two for ages. There is a good chance that most of these people haven’t even visited let alone cycled in either of these cities. For a start the topography is completely different and the infrastructure is much better.

When it comes to the medical side of things if you go to a parliamentary committee with an obesity specialist and they roll out the head of neurosurgery at the Alfred you’re in trouble. The problem is, there are alternative methods of weight loss to cycling.

So can we just sit down and say, look you dont really care if your next door neighbor is a fat bastard who doesn’t ride a bike, you just don’t want to mess your hair up on your way to a cafe. That’s ok, there’s nothing wrong with that if that’s your thing but let’s escape from the fantasy that society, or health and wellbeing is going to change overnight.

Finally nothing makes me happier than seeing people cycling I can assure you. I am a keen cyclist who tries to be out there every day and I don’t care whether you’re on 20k of carbon or a fifty buck recycled mountain bike. Our need for massive investment in cycling infrastructure is obvious. If you want to get someone riding a bike to work regularly when they have been off the bike for twenty years getting rid of helmets won’t make any difference. Giving them the opportunity of doing it without some idiot mowing them down while sending a text message is probably going to be more persuasive.

‘Empirical’ – you’ll need to look that one up. Maybe ‘fact’ too come to think of it. ( now that was a gratuitous adhom)

If there is a dumber argument than ‘nobody else does it so we shouldn’t try’ I’d love to hear it. No wait maybe it’s that the people calling for the repeal of a law don’t bear the onus of proving the law is bad, the state has an obligation to prove an existing law is good? Even if it has already and consistently found that to be the case through a democratic process.
Honestly

British Columbia in Canada is the interesting example, as Vancouver is about to follow Melbourne and Brisbane down the path of introducing a bike share scheme without rolling back the law. I would argue that if their plan fails, its a pretty big nail in the coffin on the debate as to whether MHL and bike share can co-exist. Of course other people will disagree and point to other reasons it has failed, but considering that Vancouver actually does pretty well with cyclists on the whole, I’d find the failure pretty damning without some very convincing alternative reasons.