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news
Helmet child “We want to make people who don’t wear helmets look the stupid ones”: Sister of teenage cyclist killed in collision with overtaking driver calls for mandatory cycle helmet law
The sister of a teenage cyclist who was killed after being struck by an overtaking driver, causing him to hit his head on a kerb, has called on the government to make wearing a helmet while cycling a legal requirement, telling her school assembly that “I just wish my big brother had a helmet on” the night he died.
A road safety expert, meanwhile, has responded to the youngster’s campaign by noting that, while cycle helmets can lessen the risk of traumatic brain injury in a collision, they “alone do not prevent crashes from happening” and that safer infrastructure is key to preventing fatal collisions.
> Why is Dan Walker’s claim that a bike helmet saved his life so controversial?
15-year-old Riley Ketley was cycling with friends to the shops in the Yorkshire village of Molescroft, Beverley, on 8 April 2021 when he was struck from behind by a motorist who had allegedly “sped up” to overtake the group. Riley suffered a serious head injury in the crash and died hours later in hospital.
“There was just no saving him. He had a head injury to the front of his head and a head injury to the back. He’d hit the car the front ways and he’d hit the back of it on the kerb,” Riley’s mum VJ told the BBC today.
At the inquest which followed the teenager’s death, a friend who was cycling behind Ketley – who had been told he had been accepted into the Royal Marines earlier that day – told investigators that he had pulled out into the middle of the road, as the driver of a Honda Civic “sped up as if overtaking”, leading to the collision.
The motorist, who said he felt “absolutely terrible” about the incident, claimed that he’d moved to the right to give the youngsters as much room as hospital, the Yorkshire Post reported in 2022. He said the group had seen him and moved over to the adjacent cycle lane, when Riley pulled out.
“There was absolutely no warning at all, and I had no chance to stop and avoid a collision,” the driver told the inquest.
After extensive inquiries, the police concluded that there was insufficient evidence to charge the motorist, with a forensic collision investigator determining that there was no evidence of excessive speed and that the crash was “unavoidable”.
And this week, Riley’s younger sister Amelia, now 12, has urged all cyclists to wear helmets while riding their bikes, in order to help prevent the serious head injuries suffered by her brother.
“I just wish my big brother had a helmet on that night,” Amelia told her school assembly this week, as part of her campaign, which includes handing out helmets to classmates.
The 12-year-old, who said losing her brother at the age of nine was a traumatic experience, told the BBC that wearing a helmet while cycling should be mandatory by law, in a similar manner to using a car seatbelt.
“We want to make the people who don’t wear helmets look the stupid ones,” she said. “But people don’t wear helmets and you want them to just automatically put them on instead of people having to tell them to put them on.”
> Government shuts down mandatory cycling helmets question from Conservative MP
In December 2022, the Department for Transport insisted that the government has “no intention” to make wearing a helmet while cycling a legal requirement.
Addressing a written question from a fellow Conservative MP, the then-minister of state for the department, Jesse Norman, said the matter had been considered “at length” during the cycling and walking safety review in 2018.
Norman also added that while the Department for Transport “recommends that cyclists wear helmets”, the “safety benefits of mandating cycle helmets are likely to be outweighed by the fact that this would put some people off cycling”.
Responding to Amelia’s campaign for a helmet law, Steve Cole, the director of policy, campaigns, and public affairs at The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA), noted that other factors – such as infrastructure – are more critical to ensuring the safety of cyclists on the roads than helmets.
“While everyone has the right to choose whether they wear a helmet, the evidence shows us that they can more than halve the risk of a traumatic brain injury,” Cole said.
“However, it’s important to note that helmets alone do not prevent crashes from happening, and poor infrastructure can often be to blame for collisions.”
Cole also called on the government to “publish its long overdue road safety strategy and to invest in safe infrastructure”.
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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130 comments
Who is suggesting you shouldn't care about dangerous driving? Regarding pedestrians--they don't usually travel at the same speeds as cyclists, and they don't tend to tip over the way a bicycle does; but if you want to campaign for them to wear wear helmets too, who is stopping you?
This whole article is about a sister who believes that the main lesson about a dangerous driver killing her brother is that he should have been wearing a helmet - nothing about dealing with dangerous driving.
Why should I campaign for pedestrians to wear helmets when it's so very clear that the problem is dangerous driving and a helmet is of sod all use when 2 tonnes of speeding metal hits you.
You're some kind of special idiot aren't you?
Your argument could also be used against having motorcycle helmet laws and seatbelt wearing laws, but I guess you would call people idiots for advocating for complying with them..
No.
Not at all as motorcycle helmets are designed to help with the increased speeds and energy involved with collisions. If motorcycle helmets were designed only for speeds of up to 12mph and static collisions similar to a 2m drop, then it would be criminally stupid to have a mandatory law for them.
Similarly, seatbelts are designed to cope with multi-vehicle collisions.
If a law is mandating PPE that is ineffective, then you have to look at the reasoning behind that law as it's unlikely to be for safety reasons, but more likely to provide the police with a means of targetting cyclists for a bullshit reason.
I've just liked your post, but I suspect not for the reason you think.
The evidence for motorcycle helmet and seatbelt laws are very similar to that for bicycle helmets i.e. largely absent. Oh, I know about all the studies showing huge benefits, otherwise known as bad science, but when the reliable evidence shows that their efficacy cannot be demonstrated, I'll stick with that.
Having gone head first into a car that pulled out in front of me I would say wear a helmet. While stopping the driver from pulling out would have been even better a helmet at least took some of the impact. Even a tiny reduction in energy reaching your brain is a good thing. A bit of protection from a point load is also a good thing. In my case there were three impact points on the helmet one a dent in the hard shell, the second cracking of the polystyrene under the scuffed outer shell and the third broken through. I was unconscious for a while and became aware of my surroundings about 5-6 hours later.
I still wouldn't make it mandatory to wear a helmet but guess what I will wear one every time I cycle anywhere. I won't think less of those that don't but I would recommend wearing them.
As for drivers they do not go out to crash. They may do rash things at times, they may not see things, they may misjudge speeds, they can be distracted, have a sneezing fit, the reasons for collisions are plentiful and they will happen. That is not to say don't campaign to make them happen less often, quite the reverse.
That right there is the big problem with the whole "helmet debate" - people ignore that the main cause of collisions is driver inattentiveness and lack of skill. This whole article is focussed on helmets and nothing about how to reduce road danger. The mainstream media loves to harp on about helmets and in this instance, the girl wants to humiliate cyclists for not wearing a helmet rather than trying to call out the bad drivers and humiliate them (or calling them stupid). What we need is a massive campaign to make bad driving as socially unacceptable as drink driving, but that's not what the BBC is suggesting at all.
Indeed - although I'd say an even bigger issue is the focus on issues at an individual level *.
I'd say "it's the system" - leaving aside the broader sociopolitical considerations more narrowly our public spaces are predominantly (now) set up for the movement of motor traffic and the convenience of those driving. The only way that is going to make for a safe system is by removing the vulnerable road users. Which has happened in the UK and other mass motoring countries. The problem is wherever this is "difficult" eg. space is limited because there are lots of people / competing uses of the space convenience for those not motorised is abandoned.
The UK has probably gone as far as it can in doing this without following the US route of just designing out walking and cycling entirely.
The alternative - successfully working in several places now - is a change of *goal*. Instead of simply maximising motor traffic flow / storage capacity we could aim for efficient movement of *people* with criteria that places should be really accessible to those without motor vehicles and not blighted by excessive noise / paving everything for space inefficient transport.
* That's understandable - we're most interested in what affects us, then ours and others with rapidly dwindling interest. That is also the tack taken by use of the legal system in road crashes - each its own unique event; looking at culpability and intent in the participants.
That's definitely true, but we have a major problem when politicians throw their weight behind keeping things car oriented. There's also the problem of the car industry influencing both politics and media, so we end up with a zeitgeist that we have to prioritise driving above everything else.
So what you are advocating is a real "war on motoring/motorists" rather than the pretend one that the current government is up in arms about?
To be fair, I don't think he's advocating us going around and killing drivers.
Or is he?
Where's that armoured Flying Pigeon when I need it, comrade...?
"Who is suggesting you shouldn't care about dangerous driving?"
The fact that the family of a victim killed by a car driver call for cyclists to wear helmets.
Where did your fact (?) suggest you shouldn't care about something?
Nothing in what you say supports making helmets compulsory.
Way back in the forum you'll find my report of a crash which I still can't explain the cause of. I suffered a broken left clavicula, ripped right adductor and concussion leaving me unable to give my home address to the taxi driver.
There is no way in the world that I would advocate the compulsory use of helmets. How could I? I don't always wear one.
Helmets are not designed to prevent brain injuries.
What do you think they're designed for?
IIRC it's for mitigating the injuries caused to your head (*or to your brain, thank you john_smith!) by falling onto a flat surface from roughly head height, with no other forces involved.
*edited
Which would include brain injuries.
What is it with commenters here and their childish black-and-white two-things-can't-both-be-true-at-once I'm-right-and-you're-wrong thinking?
No one has any right to even suggest that a person should be made to do anything to protect themselves from any danger. If that is the case then we have to stop anything that can injure someone. So lets ban step ladders, standing on chairs, or wearing worn out Crocs. Stupid idea.
To make obscene profits for those who manufacture and sell them.
Also to reduce the likelihood of payments by insurance companies if they can show that a cyclist victim wasn't wearing a helmet or wearing it incorrectly etc.
A scenario so unlikely as to be not worth considering. AFAIK, there has been one successful case of a cyclist being found to be guilty of contributory negligence and having their compensation reduced as a result, and it was under such peculiar circumstances that it does not make case law.
Oh, the insurance companies will try to bamboozle the ignorant by pretending that the compensation will be reduced because of the lack of helmet, but they always retract if the claimant refuses to accept that, often at the doors of the court.
Which was that one? I've never seen a case of that in the UK, though there have been several in Ireland.
I reckon he means the Irish one (I recall there just being one)
It was the one where the company was having a day out, and one of the activities was a bike race, for which helmets were provided, but one guy refused the helmet. He then rode so recklessly that he had a serious head injury which could have been mitigated by a helmet, and was found to have negligently contributed to his own injury. Can't remember the name, but I'll see if I can find it.
EDIT "In the case of Reynolds v Struct and Parker [2011] EW HC 63 QB a cyclist was participating in a cycling race organised by his employers and sustained a head injury. He was not wearing a cycle helmet although helmets were available to participants. The impact speed was held to be below 12mph and the court concluded that given the low speed of the impact, a cycle helmet would have reduced the severity of the head injury. The court made a deduction for contributory negligence of two thirds but that was based on the claimant’s reckless actions during the race as well as his failure to wear a cycle helmet so the apportionment of the deduction wasn’t stated by the court."
Thanks, hadn't heard of that one. As you said, fairly unique circumstances.
Do you have any evidence of that?
Do you know anyone else who has crashed in exactly the same way and suffered worse injuries because they were helmetless? Or did you just make it up?
Sounds like some kind of religion to me. Either that or marketing bullshit swallowed whole without a moment's pause for thought (though those may be almost interchangeable).
We would be far better off if people stuck to FACTS.
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