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news
2023 Tour Down Under, stage four (Zac Williams/SWpix.com)167 cyclists – and just four drivers – fined in police crackdown during Tour Down Under
Police in South Australia fined 167 cyclists – and just four motorists – as part of a recent two-week campaign, coinciding with the return of the Tour Down Under as a WorldTour race, apparently designed to focus on “the behaviour all road users”.
Operation Safe Cycling ran for two weeks from 9 January and targeted the Tour Down Under route, mostly centred on Adelaide and the surrounding area, as well as being implemented across South Australia, InDaily reports.
167 cyclists were fined during the operation, and a further 270 cautioned for road safety offences, while only four motorists were fined during the same period, with 17 receiving cautions.
During the same two-week period, one cyclist was killed and eight others seriously injured on South Australia’s roads.
A spokesperson for South Australia Police said that the force was unable to provide a breakdown of the fines and cautions issued.
> Partially naked pensioners arrested for Tour Down Under protest
However, during a similar campaign in 2021 – when 18 drivers and 347 cyclists received fines – most of the penalties issued to cyclists were for not wearing a helmet.
The law requiring cyclists to wear helmets in Australia, first introduced in 1991, remains contentious with campaigners who regularly undertake protest rides and claim that it discourages cycling.
A 2019 article by law professors Julia Quilter and Russell Hogg argued that the country’s mandatory helmet laws “have become a tool of disproportionate penalties and aggressive policing”.
In New South Wales, the host of last year’s world road championships in Wollongong, failure to wear a cycling helmet is the most-commonly issued on-the-spot fine in the state.
In the wake of Operation Safe Cycling, and the hundreds of cyclists stopped by officers during the Tour Down Under, South Australia Police’s Bob Gray said that the casualty numbers for cyclists in the state underline the need to “share the road safely”.
“This highlights the vulnerability of cyclists – they invariably come off worst if involved in a collision with any other vehicle,” Superintendent Gray said.
“Both cyclists and drivers need to be aware of each other, actively look for each other and share the road safely.”
After obtaining a PhD, lecturing, and hosting a history podcast at Queen’s University Belfast, Ryan joined road.cc in December 2021 and since then has kept the site’s readers and listeners informed and enthralled (well at least occasionally) on news, the live blog, and the road.cc Podcast. After boarding a wrong bus at the world championships and ruining a good pair of jeans at the cyclocross, he now serves as road.cc’s senior news writer. Before his foray into cycling journalism, he wallowed in the equally pitiless world of academia, where he wrote a book about Victorian politics and droned on about cycling and bikes to classes of bored students (while taking every chance he could get to talk about cycling in print or on the radio). He can be found riding his bike very slowly around the narrow, scenic country lanes of Co. Down.
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it seems that most places just rely on sufficient policing to reduce the issue...
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- eburtthebike 16 hours 52 min ago
I thought students were supposed to be intelligent?
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18 comments
Is the Hovding helmet certified in Australia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0J2jZHSE4dU If so, I'd hope some cyclists there would buy it just to screw with Aussie police who appear way overzealous. Personally, I'm boycotting the country as fascist.
I would too, but my daughter lives there.
No the Hovding style head protection is not legal in Australia. Australia has its own helmet testing standard and it's done in a way (sequential testing without replacement) that prevents an inflatable style helmet from ever passing.
It's actually even worse because Australian mandatory bicycle helmet laws require the helmet to have an Australian standard sticker.
Helmets purchased overseas don't have these stickers and are therefore not considered legal helmets - even if they are exactly the same as the helmet sold in Australia.
The penalty for wearing a non compliant bicycle helmet is the same as for not wearing a helmet at all.
While this is true, I really doubt the police have enough time to stop every cyclist apparently wearing a helmet to check their stickers. So I would be prpared to chance it.
Also I wonder if I would be remanded in custody awaiting a court appearance for such a trivial offence, feels like I could easily be out of the country before it was resolved.
It's likely the Australian police wouldn't care about tourists - they're more interested in using it as a pretext to harass poorer suburbs and minorities.
what about minority tourists?
I think they mainly want to target aboriginals, so depends on your minority.
They also jailed a bloke for three days for not wearing a helmet and riding one of those electric unicycles. To be fair, that's South Australia for you. We in Western Australia have nothing to do with the eastern states.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-01-24/electric-unicyclist-renew-calls-f...
"167 cyclists were fined during the operation, and a further 270 cautioned for road safety offences, while only four motorists were fined during the same period, with 17 receiving cautions."
Clearly SA police are tackling the biggest cause of death and injury on their roads, the cyclists. Maybe if they didn't make the cyclists wear helmets they might not behave so recklessly and not kill so many drivers?
I cannot believe that my Aussie cousins would dare cycle without a helmet. What about the magpies and drop-bears?!
It's only because cyclists are kinder so stop when the police ask them too rather than speeding off
Australia does not seem very bike friendly... I do not dream of riding there.
Does "all" mean something different in Australia? I do not for one moment believe that forty times more cyclists break the law than motorists.
'But cyclists', innit.
If cyclists in Australia attached wigs to their cycle helmets would police eventually learn that this is simply one of those laws they choose not to enforce?
I would thoroughly recommend not trying this in the UK, especially in areas patroled by the London Met. You might get much worse than a fine from a passing Police Officer.
I have a friend who wears something like this while cycling, not sure if this is the exact brand. Hers has replaceable covers available in many styles, and some of them are really hard to tell that they're helmets.
https://bikepretty.com/products/straw-hat-bike-helmet?variant=45116590467
I doubt it, since attaching a wig, a sticker, a helmet camera or a light is classed as a "modification" to the helmet by the helmet manufacturers. The law requries an Australian Standards compliant helmet. Any modification renders the helmet no longer compliant with the standard, and thus not legal to wear - a surprise to many cyclists who view helmets as a hardware-mounting platform