RTA cyclist safety ad: helmets are used for ‘cool stuff’
The Road & Traffic Authority has launched a radio campaign to encourage cyclists in New South Wales to wear helmets.
The ad makes the point that helmets are used “for all kinds of cool stuff” such as brake dancing, skate boarding, motorcycling and cricket – so cyclists should wear them too.
The campaign was created by Loud, which won the assignment after a competitive pitch.
Jesus. Over-written much? Surely there was a way to make this point without a wall of words. Not the best use of radio IMO.
If I overcome my natural aversion to the helmet legislation itself, this is a nice way to encourage adoption.
I like the ad, gets a pretty stale category message across in a fun way.
Concerns lay in the radio format. Cant remember the last time I was a) either riding along listening to the radio or b) sitting at home listening to the radio and about to go for a ride?
Good to see the RTA wasting money. The differnece between all the sports mentioned only with motorcycle riding is it mandatory. Also when going to the shops walking one could trip and hit their head, we do not mandate pedestrians wear a helmet?
How many skateboarders do you see wearing helmets on the street? The law is an ass. Sure, pro skateboarders often do (but often don’t) but then they are in an extreme sport. Cycling generally isn’t an extreme sport, any more than walking or getting a bus is. (Hey – rally drivers wear helmets! Let’s wear them in our cars! That would actually save more lives per year than cyclists wearing them)
Helmets discourage riding (plenty of data out there about this) which makes riding per km far more dangerous, with less cyclists on the road.
Not to mention that cycling helmets have less than 1-2mm compression and therefore offer virtually no protection from an impact anyway.
Some people who know more about it than me…
http://helmetfreedom.org/
http://www.bmj.com/content/332/7543/722.2.full (That’s the Lancet)
http://www.cycle-helmets.com/ (About WA)
http://www.john-adams.co.uk/20.....f-culture/
http://www.cyclehelmets.org/ (Particularly http://www.cyclehelmets.org/1211.html which compares the failure of the Melbourne bike hire scheme with that of Dublin. Who carries a bike helmet around on the offchance they want to borrow a bike?!)
http://www.nohelmetlaw.org.uk/nhl/
I assume it is a slow waltz if one is “brake” dancing.
I notice a disturbing number of cyclists wearing iDevices. More dangerous than no helmet in some ways, but I’m sure that’s in the to-be-banned pile as well.
Bike riders don’t have any other forms of transport?
What would work better? Outdoor? when they’re already on their bikes with no helmet on?
75% of deaths of cyclists are in multiple-vehicle accidents – which basically means that they’re getting hit by cars/buses/trucks.
If the government was serious, they’d work on separating bikes and vehicles. Helmets will only do so much, especially in a bike vs car collision.
(I wouldn’t ride on the roads without one, but being forced to wear a bike helmet on a serene bike path is bloody stupid)
cricket isn’t cool
soldiering in battle isn’t cool
more people die of head injuries as pedestrians and car drivers by miles… the same logic of protection requires them to wear ’em too
but I wouldn’t make a law about that- that’d be an infringement of your/their rights.
What’s so special about my head?
It’s my head… piss off
It’s my head. I’ll decide what to wear and when. Another ad from the nanny state
Does the government want to send them all back to the playstation where they can ride a virtual bike instead?
Our kids are now the most obese on earth!
Encourage them to use bicycles and be active.
Not tell them that bikes are dangerous by emphasizing helmets.
Australia and New Zealand are the only countries in the world with helmet laws. Strangely our rate of injuries and death is no higher. All that happened when the laws came in is that people stopped riding bikes. And as for Melbourne’s BYO bike share scheme? Gee I wonder why that isn’t working …
@matt and @ferdinand artichoke… sure it’s your head. But what of the fact that if a driver accidentally clips you for some reason, you get a head injury because you’re not wearing a helmet. That person then has to live with the guilt of giving you brain damage or putting you in hospital or worse for the rest of their life, even if it wasn’t their fault. So, it’s not just your head…
End rant.
Leaving aside the absurdity of the bicycle helmet law, this approach in terms of advertising has been shown to be ineffective.
It’s the same tired old format; essentially trying to encourage helmet wearing by scaring people with stories of ‘major brain injuries’. Good grief, according to this advert riding a bicycle is apparently so dangerous you risk your life every time you jump on a treadley to pop to the shop for some milk.
These approaches have been around for a long time, and have been quite extensively studied. What they show is that, rather than encouraging those who do not wear helmets to don one, they rather dissuade people from riding. Sure, the percentage of the cycling population wearing helmets goes up, but that is because the total number of cyclist goes down – with those who do not want to wear helmets being the ones who give up.
Now, I’m fairly sure the brief was to ‘encourage people to wear helmets’, not ‘scare off people who do not wear a helmet’. As such I think Loud have missed the mark here, and it does not reflect well on them that they did not look at any research into what approaches to this issue have been tried in the past, and whether they were effective.
Bloody hell. Everyone (nearly) agrees. @Alex – well, if they accidentally clip you, it *is* their fault. And yeah, the poor old car driver has to live with the knowledge they injured someone – won’t someone think of the drivers!
On the Melbourne bikeshare riff, which is going to continue being an absolute disaster, this compares it to a similarly modest scheme in Dublin. Worth a watch, and some good points towards the end.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPjvZlAl_js
@Gav, why is it always the driver’s fault if a rider gets accidentally clipped?
Last week I saw a guy riding in the rain, down the middle of a busy road in peak hour, with no lights, dressed all in black, listening to music and wearing no helmet yet it would be the driver’s fault if there was an accident???
Okay cool.
Denmark is traditionally one of the safest places in the work to ride a bike as transport, and is where people do that to a a degree we can only dream of. Paradise for cyclists? Well, they had a helmet campaign recently.
This campaign has been trying, like Loud’s campaign here, to instill fear in the danish bike user. Result; bike sales have fallen 5%. Bike entry to Copenhagen down by 10,000. Over all cycling is down 30% since 1990.
Put his together with the fact that the health benefits of cycling, irrespective of helmets, is 20 times more than the risks, and you can equate helmet campaigns, here and there, with insanity.
Let’s not kid ourselves, Helmet Hair is clearly the issue here.
If the RTA really cared about cyclist safety they’d spend their money on building cycling infrastructure or educating drivers to be more careful about cyclists.
Why push a failed policy?
Wow, @Alex, #14, it says it all why helmets about are being pushed so hard. It isn’t about cyclist’s safety at all. It is to assure drivers that cyclists are safe and they don’t have to worry about driving safely and won’t have a death or injury on their conscience.
The only flaw in that is that helmets don’t actually offer much protection, being designed to only absorb impacts with falls under about 10km/h. Being hit by a driver is going to do much more damage than that. But helmets are lazy and easy policy decisions. You don’t have to do anything to actually make cycling safer, difficult measures like lowering speeds or taking away parking spaces.
Why do cycling friendly cities without mandatory helmet laws have a better safety record than Australian cities? Because they invest people freindly infrastructure and have road rules that protect and accomodate vulnerable road users. The RTA should be doing something useful for cyclists instead of wasting their money on advertisements like this.
So true that the RTA is being hypocritical, pushing helmets when they don’t build safe infrastructure into new road sections.
On the Central Coast, NSW, a new RTA section, which would have been a good opportunity to incorporate a bike lane, diverts cyclists onto a wide footpath.
It could be acceptable except that approx 30 hidden driveways open onto this path in the half km that it runs. Riding it, there’s the constant fear of an unseen car shooting out of one of these drives into your path.
The RTA knows this is worst practice because they have not installed the usual bike symbol on the section. Cyclists are left to assume this is their place or head for the unprotected road.
Why no sign even though i was assured the section was for bikes? Because they fear being sued if an accident does happen, that’s my guess.
So, shame on them for helmet propaganda when they demonstrate such lack of concern where it really counts. True bike safety is under the wheels. Not on the head.
Essential viewing… http://www.b3ta.com/links/Riding_in_bike_lanes