The city of Sydney may be giving people ideas. In New South Wales, cycle safety is increasingly becoming the responsibility of cyclists. As of yesterday, the fine for a cyclist who ran a red light was increased five-fold to about £220. Cycling without a helmet could cost you £160. Drivers are to be fined a similar amount for failing to leave a gap of one metre when overtaking somebody on a bike, and more at higher speeds.
None of this is bad, although the British libertarian might be wary about the new requirement for cyclists to carry photographic identification. Moreover, an insistence on at least a metre between bicycle and car, while certainly essential for any vehicle moving faster than a crawl, might prove tricky in narrow British streets. While cyclists should be encouraged to think of themselves as road users, with the same safety responsibilities as anyone else on the roads, urban society benefits when more, rather than fewer, people take to two wheels.
Australia and New Zealand are the only two nations in the world which require cyclists to wear helmets. In the safest countries to cycle, such as the Netherlands or Denmark, helmets are a secondary issue. It is certainly wise to wear one, but pelvic and lower-limb injuries are big causes of cyclist death too. Far more important is the infrastructure and special cycle lanes designed to keep cyclists safe.
Cycling in Britain has boomed in the past decade, and this newspaper has long campaigned to help it to boom further. Funding has been pledged by authorities in a handful of areas, but reality has not always matched rhetoric. On April 29, The Times and the London Cycling Campaign host a hustings with the city’s main mayoral candidates on cycling. Sydney’s experiment may be interesting, but it should not be a model.