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Sydney designer comes up with helmet with licence plate, indicators, windscreen wipers and more
A Sydney, Australia designer has jumped on board the cyclist licensing bandwagon in New South Wales with a design for a helmet that incorporates a machine-readable number plate, and has tried to get a Sydney suburban council to back the idea.
Toby King presented his 'Smart Hat' design to the council of affluent Sydney suburb Mosman on November 11.
The council was asked to support the concept and write to NSW roads minister Duncan Gay requesting a meeting to introduce it to the state government.
As well as a number plate, Mr King's Smart Hat incorporates brake lights, indicators, a visor, a slot for your smartphone, a display and wipers to clear the visor when it rains.
According to Jessica Rapana of the Mosman Daily, Mr King told the meeting: “This is a concept for better road safety. It is not a product or a business, it is a concept design. There are not many features on the current helmets that makes them safe.”
Mr King told road.cc that he's just trying to improve cyclist safety. Smart Hat, he said, is for responsible cycliss whowant to be part of the road user community.
He has at least one Mosman councillor backing him. Councillor Simon Menzies said the Smart Hat would provide a solution for commuter cyclists to be registered and able to showcase their registration number.
“People who use it as a mode of transport should be registered and insured,” Cllr Menzies told the Mosman Daily.
“Every other road user pays for registration and it should not be any different.”
The New South Wales state government is considering licensing for cyclists, and Minister Gay has said he is considering banning cyclists from certain roads in Sydney.
Cllr Menzies said he believed relations between drivers and riders would be better if drivers thought riders could be held accountable for their actions.
“It annoys drivers that cyclists can get away with breaking road rules,” he said.
The council did not pass the motion supporting the Smart Hat, but instead passed an amended motion supporting "concepts which aim to improve safety for cyclists and reduce cycle collisions between vehicles and pedestrians" and encouraging Mr King to "present his Smart Hat concept to the NSW Stay Safe Committee".
As you can see from the above diagram, the Smart Hat has just about every bell and whistle you could possibly imagine. And a few you probably couldn't.
Here's how it all fits together:
Its features include:
Built-in camera and headlight
Indicators
Rear light
Brake light
E-tag (some Sydney motorways require tolls for motor vehicles)
Proximity sensors
Mirrors
Visor
Wiper blades
Smart phone slot
Shock-absorbing chin bar (optional)
Display and processor
License plate holder
The lights, wiper motors, sensors and other electronics will be powered by batteries built into the helmet.
Mr King couldn't say how much he expects the Smart Hat to weigh or cost, though he thought the market would bear a price of about AU$200 or £100.
On his website, Mr King says: "Smart Hat is a concept design to greatly increase rider safety, while also addressing some of the more inflammatory issues between cyclists, pedestrians and road users."
Smart Hat's tagline is 'for Responsible Cyclists'. Mr King explains: "Without accountability, there is no respononsibility. Smart Hat allows a license sign to be attached, identifying the rider to other road users, pedestrians & authorities. Registation is a method for riders to show their riding skills, insure themselves & third parties and welcomed as a responsible user of road & pedestrian environments."
"Smart Hat provides the rider with ultimate safety & comfort."
John has been writing about bikes and cycling for over 30 years since discovering that people were mug enough to pay him for it rather than expecting him to do an honest day's work.
He was heavily involved in the mountain bike boom of the late 1980s as a racer, team manager and race promoter, and that led to writing for Mountain Biking UK magazine shortly after its inception. He got the gig by phoning up the editor and telling him the magazine was rubbish and he could do better. Rather than telling him to get lost, MBUK editor Tym Manley called John’s bluff and the rest is history.
Since then he has worked on MTB Pro magazine and was editor of Maximum Mountain Bike and Australian Mountain Bike magazines, before switching to the web in 2000 to work for CyclingNews.com. Along with road.cc founder Tony Farrelly, John was on the launch team for BikeRadar.com and subsequently became editor in chief of Future Publishing’s group of cycling magazines and websites, including Cycling Plus, MBUK, What Mountain Bike and Procycling.
John has also written for Cyclist magazine, edited the BikeMagic website and was founding editor of TotalWomensCycling.com before handing over to someone far more representative of the site's main audience.
He joined road.cc in 2013. He lives in Cambridge where the lack of hills is more than made up for by the headwinds.
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64 comments
might I suggest we get all aussie cyclists to ride topless, it is warm and sunny, then tattoo a number on their backs.
The only helmet here is the designer!
Is it April-1 already?
Calm down folks, it's a joke.
It has something missing..... a syringe driver for all those performance enhancing drugs
Or maybe there will be an 'Armstrong' signature de-lux version 
It's based on those cheese wedge hats that fans of the Green Bay Packers wear.
why dont car users put their phones behind their licence plate? BECAUSE ITS A STUPID THING TO DO.
The Daily Mail has reported on it, I do hope they get a few more comments, I love reading those Daily Mail comments
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2832762/Is-bike-helmet-red-light...
As the safety of the cyclist is paramount in this design, I have another idea.
http://inhabitat.com/activists-show-what-it-would-look-like-if-bikes-too...
This is needed in Australia, the cyclists there have obviously caused animosity with their red-light jumping and general poor behavior. NSW should fund this helmet and make it mandatory to make the roads safer and to increase respect between the people of NSW and cyclists.
Good grief, I just read some of the comments on the Australian site with the original report. Try to imagine an extreme version of the Daily Mail. That's right, you need to recalibrate the Daily Mail to moderate.
Is there some sort of diplomacy equivalent of an intervention?
Simpson's fans?
Truly awful design, it's the size of a garden shed.
This quote makes no sense:
"Registation is a method for riders to show their riding skills, insure themselves & third parties and welcomed as a responsible user of road & pedestrian environments."
Registration has nothing to do with riding skills or insurance.
What worries me is this drive to get us all licensed and paying taxes yet giving us nothing in return such as laws protecting us when motorists want to pass us (California this month passed a 3 meter rule when passing). Or giving us dedicated cycling lanes like most other countries have.
I still get idiots telling me that i do not pay road tax in the UK at which point i have to remind them that they do not either.
my only feeling is that this is basically an effort to get bikes off the road. Everyone? knows that bicycles are toys and have no place on modern roads. That all cyclists do is hold up traffic, jump red lights, cause accidents, run down little old grannies, video law abiding motorists, whinge if they get hit start wars in the middle east*.....
*GWB rode a bike so it must be true.
After reading this I had to check the date and make sure it wasn't April 1st.
And that I wasn't reading a satire.
When people started wearing the first bicycle helmets in the early 1980s, popular sentiment considered them absolutely ridiculous. Now they have been compulsory in Australia for 24 years, cycling conditions and attitudes are crap, participation is woefully low, and people who ride without helmets are considered "idiots" by popular sentiment, and fined by the police. So laugh now (yes I did too), but watch out. There are no depths of stupidity low enough that Australian cycling policy can't plumb them.
If cyclists have to start paying "road tax" or whatever you want to call it, then we need to be treated as "proper road users" and have our own dedicated infrastructure. Since we all know that will never happen, why would we pay "road tax"? We all contribute to the general taxation pool anyway, so...
Personally, I think that the 'smart helmet' looks like it was built out of a plastic brick construction system that shall remain nameless, and like it is purposefully intended to make people say "Ah, well, I think I'll just get a car, mate....".
That would cure Chris Froome of his "lookingatpowermeteritis", but other than that I can draw no positives...
I much prefer our version... Magpies are a real problem in spring.
CyclesVersion.PNG
+1
I will never click a dm link but please tell us they are taking it seriously?
My first thought was 'Is this a Chris Morris/Armando Iannucci sort-of-deal?'
My next was 'NfA' (Normal for Australia).
Yep, basically that's what it is. And everyone knows that, and everyone knows that everyone knows that, and the politicians concerned don't give a damn that everyone knows what's going on. They're playing to the mob, and the Australian media portray cyclists as the outsider and a social problem.
As long as it uses the safety argument as a disclaimer, they can play just about any anti-cycling card in plain site. In fact I bet they also claim that many of their best friends are cyclists...
" giving us nothing in return such as laws protecting us when motorists want to pass us (California this month passed a 3 meter rule when passing)"
A lot of states have the law, Enforcement is the problem. The likely hood that A police officer actually witnesses it combined with whether they actually want to enforce it makes it similar in affect to the law against J-walking
Oh I'm sure road.cc readers would love the DM, it has a whole column of articles going down the side of the page about women wearing very little, with nothing but comments on their body shape and weight.
So here's how road.cc reported the item again
Now see if you can spot the difference in the DM reporting
Has it actually been acknowledged anywhere as being a hoax/joke?
That's like shooting fish in a barrel.
It's like something out of Tron. But reimagined by a complete moron.
More laughable is the apparent support for this. Really glad I don't cycle in Australia!
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