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Comment by anorwell | Hacker News Reader

The article says:

> When the Australian cities of Melbourne and Brisbane mandated helmet use, it actually made streets less safe for cyclists. The number of people riding bikes dropped precipitously, which reduced the “Safety in Numbers” effect.

This links to [1], but this paper doesn't seem to support the assertion at all.

> These results help explain why two of the four companies operating in Sydney decided to leave the city in July 2018: the low rate of trips-per-day per bike, a high level of vandalism, and the threat of heavy fines from councils made the system one without potential for financial profit. While dockless bikesharing appears to be successful in many cities globally, the factors leading to its success have not been replicated in Sydney to date.

There's no mention of helmets, and the paper is specifically about bike sharing programs, not biking in general.

[1] https://findingspress.org/article/7615-stationless-in-sydney...

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Presumably the first link was intended to link [1] which says Australia's mandatory helmet laws reduced cycling by "30-40% overall, and up to 80% in some demographic groups"

It also claims that "MHLs are the main reason for the failure of Australia’s two public bike hire schemes. Brisbane and Melbourne are the only two cities in the world with helmet laws to have attempted public bike hire. While schemes in places like Paris, London, Montreal, Dublin and Washington DC have flourished, Brisbane and Melbourne have amongst the lowest usage rates in the world."

Presumably in editing, the article's two mentions of cycle hire schemes got confused.

[1] https://www.aph.gov.au/DocumentStore.ashx?id=173283f8-7b1c-4...

I'll cite SWOV.nl (Dutch institute for road safety research):

> The effect of (mandatory) bicycle helmets on bicycle use is not clear. Several international studies show that bicycle use decreases after the introduction of helmet laws, even though most studies do not find such an effect or only find a temporary effect [9] [42] [49]. [...]

> There are two international review studies of the effect of mandatory helmet use on the use of bicycles, both dating from 2018 [9] [42]. The first study [42] shows that the available research results are not unequivocal. It states that mandatory helmet use could indeed result in a decrease of the number of cyclists, but that this need not always be the case and that, if the number of cyclists initially decreases, that need not be of long duration. The second study is a mostly qualitative analysis of the available literature [9]. Based on their findings, the researchers conclude that there is little to no evidence of a substantial decrease of bicycle use due to the introduction of mandatory helmets. They have examined 23 studies/data sets and conclude that 2 of these studies support the hypothesis that mandatory helmets lead to a decrease of cycling, whereas 13 studies do not, and 8 studies show mixed results.

> The abovementioned review studies only concern research done abroad, in particular in Australia and North America.

https://swov.nl/en/fact-sheet/bicycle-helmets (Under "What is the effect of helmet use on the popularity of cycling?")

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