Bicycle Safety !

We have just had a law change in New South Wales which raises the age limit at which kids can ride their bicycles on the footpath.   The old law required them to ride on the road and share it with cars when they turned twelve years old.  This upgrade raises that to sixteen

Strangely, New South Wales and Victoria are the only states which impose an age limit on cycling on footpaths.  It is perfectly legal in the rest of Australia at any age and there are few instances where that seems to have been a problem.

Here in Sydney we have spent a lot of money creating shared cycling and walking paths in an effort to promote the use of bicycles as a replacement for polluting cars.  It intensely annoys motorists to have slow pushbikes weaving along in city traffic when there is a perfectly good but unused such track running parallel with the road.   There is no law in place to force bike riders to use that facility.

The only place bikes are banned seems to be in road tunnels.  These usually have a speed limit higher than can be achieved on a bike and that represents an obvious danger.  Highways with a speed limit of 110 kph have a narrow bike lane less than a metre from the traffic flow and often that surface is littered with roadside debris.  Legally, a child of any age can ride in that facility.

The expectation of many parents is that their children can ride safely to school and return home by the same method - and that can not be achieved if they have to share the road with the normal traffic flow.  Children usually become conversant with the traffic rules when they begin to learn to drive a car.  The very fact that they are children is the usual reason they are unreliable decision makers until they reach maturity.

The obvious danger of children riding bikes on shared footpaths is when that bike is ridden furiously at high speed, and that is something kids of all ages sometimes do.  Collision with the aged and infirm can cause serious injury and the fact that bikes are silent increases this danger.  Perhaps a requirement that all bikes ridden on footpaths have a " flapper "  activated by contact with the wheel spokes to make a noise would be a welcome improvement.

It seems to be a fact of life that the police ignore cyclists - with the exception of booking those not wearing a safety helmet.  In the past riders over twelve and many adults rode on footpaths without hindrance and little is likely to change.  The vast majority ride at a safe speed and with a little common sense danger can be avoided.   The old and infirm would be wise to avoid those time periods before and after school when bike traffic on footpaths would be heavy.

Parents should be urged to instill in children  the basic courtesy of slowing to accommodate pedestrian traffic and riding in a sensible manner, and a law change to require shared bike paths to be used where they are provided would be welcome.

Bike riding children have never been known to take much notice of the law and little is likely to change.