48
Safety vests and helmets make cyclists look ‘less human’ to other road users
(theconversation.com)
this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2023
48 points (96.2% liked)
Australia
3607 readers
39 users here now
A place to discuss Australia and important Australian issues.
Before you post:
If you're posting anything related to:
- The Environment, post it to Aussie Environment
- Politics, post it to Australian Politics
- World News/Events, post it to World News
- A question to Australians (from outside) post it to Ask an Australian
If you're posting Australian News (not opinion or discussion pieces) post it to Australian News
Rules
This community is run under the rules of aussie.zone. In addition to those rules:
- When posting news articles use the source headline and place your commentary in a separate comment
Banner Photo
Congratulations to @Tau@aussie.zone who had the most upvoted submission to our banner photo competition
Recommended and Related Communities
Be sure to check out and subscribe to our related communities on aussie.zone:
- Australian News
- World News (from an Australian Perspective)
- Australian Politics
- Aussie Environment
- Ask an Australian
- AusFinance
- Pictures
- AusLegal
- Aussie Frugal Living
- Cars (Australia)
- Coffee
- Chat
- Aussie Zone Meta
- bapcsalesaustralia
- Food Australia
- Aussie Memes
Plus other communities for sport and major cities.
https://aussie.zone/communities
Moderation
Since Kbin doesn't show Lemmy Moderators, I'll list them here. Also note that Kbin does not distinguish moderator comments.
Additionally, we have our instance admins: @lodion@aussie.zone and @Nath@aussie.zone
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I think we all agree that the most important factor here to getting people on bikes is providing the feeling of safety (+ actual safety) and convenience, which I would argue needs to be better infrastructure first, helmet law relaxations second.
Can you imagine if they do helmet law relaxations first? The media would have a field day.
If someone is more discouraged to ride because helmets are a hassle or might ruin their hair, instead of death by car due to poor infrastructure and car-centrism, then I'd look at such a person sideways.
It's not really an either/or. In order to get investment in infrastructure, there needs to be interest in cycling. This means removing barriers where present. A great example of this is in bike shares. New York City introduced a bike share in the early 2000s, and that helped to increase ridership. Increased ridership lead to the construction of miles of inner city separated bike lane.
The Melbourne bike share had consistently low ridership, and was abandoned entirely in 2019. They explicitly cited the helmet law as the reason.. In Brisbane, 85% of people said the helmet law was why they didn't use the bike share.
If we want to increase actual cyclist safety, we desperately need the infrastructure, but for the infrastructure we need cyclists. One of the best methods for getting more cyclists doesn't work in Australia. Maybe that should change.