Young men careening around without helmets are doing my head in

I started noticing them a few months ago and now, it seems, they’re everywhere. Groups of young men careening along roads chock-a-block with cars. Single cyclists merrily riding up the wrong side of the footpath, then swinging back onto the road, seemingly without a care in the world. All without helmets. They may as well be whooping and hollering, that’s how much fun they’re having.

I get it. Wind in your hair feels good. But wow, how did we get to this? More than three decades after bike helmets became mandatory in Australia – leading the world, I might add – a whole new generation seems to have missed the message. You know, the one about how getting hit by a car without a helmet is a death sentence. How your skull just isn’t enough protection to save your life when it hits, at pace, hard things like bitumen, windscreens, bumpers. A moving tyre.

I’m honestly perplexed. Are the e-bike companies not providing enough helmets for those who pick them up in one place and drop them off in another? Are the helmets getting broken, or lost, and not replaced in a timely manner? Are the police not being as vigilant with e-bike riders as they were with regular cyclists back when they were changing our behaviour en masse? Or is it a bit like smoking – reckless, bad-for-your-health stuff we thought we’d dealt with that’s somehow, inexplicably, become cool again. I see regular bike riders doing it, too, albeit not nearly as often.

I know, I sound like a Karen. I’m of the right generation and my name does start with a K, so I’m already Karen-adjacent, I guess. But as writer Claire Heaney argued recently, there are Good Karens and Bad Karens. Or maybe, Good Karen Behaviour and Bad Karen Behaviour. And I’d argue this is Good Karen Behaviour, caring that our kids and young adults, you know, live. (Bad Karen Behaviour would be picking up the e-bike dumped outside your house and dumping it outside someone else’s house, as one of my neighbours – a male Karen – is fond of doing.)

Lime is the most common e-bike in my ’hood, so I email its Australian press office. I just want a chat, really, about whether they’re as worried about it as I am, what they might be doing about it. I receive an email back from Aprille, of the external PR company. “Unfortunately, we do not have numbers on this and [it] is not something we can speak to.”

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That sounds like a blow-off to me. I just wanted to chat, Aprille! I send a few follow-up questions, including: How many Lime bikes have helmets with them? Is Lime doing anything to ensure that riders use those helmets? Aprille responds the next day, asking for more context on the story I’m doing. She says she won’t be able to get back to me until next week.

The CEO of Bicycle NSW is much more chatty. Peter McLean tells me he’s also worried about this “growing non-compliance” issue. He suspects some of the rule breakers are from countries where helmets aren’t mandatory. McLean tells me a smaller e-bike company, Ario, has put sensors in its helmets, so the bikes won’t start if the helmet doesn’t register as on a head. (Well done, Ario. See, everyone else? Not that hard.)

Perhaps change is coming. A NSW parliamentary inquiry into the use of e-bikes, scooters and the like is due to hand down its final report in February, and just a couple of months ago, MP Sophie Scamps introduced to federal parliament a private member’s bill on e-bike safety. I hope they deal with the helmet issue.

It seems a cultural problem as much as anything. So here’s an idea for some clever ad people: devise something like the Transport Accident Commission’s “drink, drive, bloody idiot” campaigns of the late 1980s and 1990s in Victoria. They were very successful in making drink-driving uncool. Get a new ad made and get it onto the ’Tok and the ’gram. Pronto.

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