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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
Tram lines cause bike accidents all the time in Melbourne, so according to you, most of inner Melbourne would be closed down to traffic and redesigned to protect cyclists from their own incompetence in coping with roads/traffic.
Why would you let a system which is constantly responsible for injuries to continue to operate?
Now - *how* you address it, that's a different thing.
Cars and road design have become hugely safer over time. Some of that driven by sales eg. people may pay for a safer car. But while there was also lobbying from motor trade governing bodies recognised that "saving people from themselves" on the roads was to some extent a very good idea, rather than just decrying the victim's as stupid. (They did that also of course and still do ...)
The tram system there is certainly extensive!
Don't know the history but where I stay (Edinburgh) the council and their company deliberately ignored requests, offers of free consultants etc. from experienced experts from continental Europe and did what *they* thought best. Cue hundreds of injuries and a couple of deaths (cause of one is less clear but a cyclist slipped due to rails and was run over).
Over a million in compensation and they've had to make some expensive and less than ideal adaptions. Causing a fair bit of disruption.
I can think of a couple of reasons - in their own interest - why they might have been a bit more proactive...
Tram lines and bikes aren't a good mix and if tram lines are involved in fatal incidents, then there should absolutely by an investigation as to why we're putting tyre traps in the same space that cyclists use. You may consider it "incompetence", but why would we want to have dangerous infrastructure that is only safe for experienced cyclists to use? It's quite possible for tourists to be wanting to cycle around a city and having roads that are known to be likely to catch them out seems an odd choice.
Is two cyclists get their handlebars tangled, say, and one crashes and dies, would you ask the same thing? There is no road design that will prevent "unavoidable fatalities".
Well - does that happen often?
Has this happened before on this road / cycle path? Has it happened before on this *type* of road / cycle path? Do certain designs of bike make this more likely? Are the rules / training making this more likely?
There are certainly road designs which prevent what were (and sometimes still are) called "unavoidable fatalities" - things like roads with centre lines, cats-eyes, street lighting, traffic lights, rumble strips, energy absorbing barriers, level crossings with gates (or avoiding having a level crossing entirely), crumple zones, airbags ...
Asking the questions ("why did it happen? What could we do differently?") is always valid. The answer may ultimately be "due to the combination of circumstances we can't see how we'd stop it". Or "perhaps X might stop this but it happens so rarely we're at a point of diminishing returns trying to fix that". The last is "politics" of course.
However in the UK the honest answer is often "it happens because we were and still are are prepared to allocate lots of tax to facilitate most adults operating cars and make it very convenient for them - but we're not prepared to spend a fraction of that or reduce driving convenience slightly to make it safer for those not in cars".
We know that a percentage of people are going to "make mistakes". We know what makes that more likely. There are (relatively) low cost ways of dramatically reducing the likelihood of certain classes of "accidents".
Don't worry - we have the Road Safety Investigation Branch for exactly this kind of enquiry! ... oh, "still committed to doing this" years later.
No doubt it will swing into action seconds after the review of driving offences and penalties commences. (Still in 2018 apparently 15 people thought the government should be jollied along, so that's something).
Maybe we cannot entirely eliminate fatalities, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try (that is the goal of "Vision Zero").
Considering your specific example, why did their handlebars get entangled? Were there potholes or street furniture or other issues that cause the cyclists to collide? Was it because the cycle lane was too narrow? Sensible countries design in "sociable" cycling: https://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2016/08/mass-cycling-requires-soci...
They usually get tangled because the riders aren't paying attention. It's got nothing to do with road design and really no one's fault.
Doesn't quite meet the standard of "unavoidable" though does it?
Well clearly he didn't if he hit one of them
"Enough room" would generally mean that you DON'T hit someone if they suddenly move out or fall over…
This is the whole reason for requiring 1.5 meters of clearance. Then there is the margin for error when the rider wobbles, swerves or generally does things that a cyclist does.
Going by your logic, no motorist should pass a cyclist in case the cyclist suddenly chooses to turn in front of a motorist..
IIRC you're in Australia and I'm sure they do things differently there.
in the UK Highway Code, you pass with at least 1.5 metre clearance and this has been explained as being so that if the cyclist in front of you suddenly falls over sideways (medical/mechanical) or has to swerve to avoid a pothole or squirrel then the motorist won't run over their head. Seems like common sense, doesn't it?
Nobody said anything about them suddenly turning in front of you, so that's a bit of a straw man?
Mind you, when on a bike I've had a motorist suddenly turn across me without indicating or warning, very dangerous: was that what you meant?
New laws proposed by victims or their families are often not good ones, as they are (understandably) hyper-focused on the specifics of their case. They're an important part of the debate, but public policy needs to be dispassionate.
Cough, cough - Matthew Briggs - cough, cough.
The Briggs incident is ironically an excellent example of where a pedestrian helmet would most likely have saved Mrs Briggs' life. However, that is still victim blaming as PPE is not the first thing we should turn to and I think it's offensive to be labelling people as "stupid" for making a decision to not wear PPE for non-dangerous activities such as walking and cycling.
Not that offensive though, given the age of the person doing the labelling, and her circumstances.
This is why places like the BBC try to get opinions from youngsters in distress to further their anti-cycling agenda - any criticism of the bullshit message and it can be justified due to the age of their chosen mouthpiece.
They had Matt Briggs on R4 Today this morning, the usual nonsense, including that they couldn't get anyone from "The Cycling Lobby" to be interviewed: maybe because it doesn't exist? Or the fact that it's a Bank holiday weekend and they're all taking some well deserved time off?
I don't like the divisive language ("stupid ones") used by this appeal, campaign or whatever it is at this stage. This is hugely victim-blaming, and should not be coming from the family of a victim themselves.
I can only imagine how it is for his family and sister to deal with this.
Even if they had been educated here on road.cc it's understandable they might reach for any "reasonable" solution.
With distance from their loss we can suggest that this is not the most effective response. And indeed a product of our attitudes around driving and transport.
Our system is always going to trade safety improvements with further reducing the convenience of active travel or making places less pleasant. Because prioritising moving (and storing...) vehicles is something which most people just assume.
I understand what you're saying but isn't the reasonable (and obvious) solution to reduce the the speed limit to 20mph. The evidence is that the chance of surviving a collision increases dramatically.
On a long straight road like this one you would probably also conclude the need to introduce traffic calming measures. A few chicanes should do the trick.
Here it is; slow motorists down to the speed of cyclists; next thing is a call to criminalise motorists overtaking cyclists, but then your desire for road 'calming' would close off space for motorists to get past a slow cyclist..
I'm guessing you mean this ironically but that is in fact a) reasonable in certain environments b) practical (including "can be accepted by drivers") and c) you can go and see this in action!
... in the Netherlands. Athough I appreciate that's a long way from Australia! Luckily there are thousands of hours of videos you can watch.
Try Googling "fietsstraat" - Athough not all of these mean "no overtaking cyclists" (that requires separate regulation and signage). Here's a couple:
https://aseasyasridingabike.wordpress.com/2013/06/12/dont-misunderstand-...
https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2023/10/04/this-cycle-street-was-a-di...
Both slightly cautionary tales reminding us that the rules are rather the icing on the cake. The main thing is to have a very low volume of motor traffic compared to cyclists - indeed low overall.
That means the street should not be a *road* - not a through route for motor traffic. Nor provide access for lots of people driving to a destination. For those cycling should have separate space (if cyclists even need to be there - nobody's suggesting adding cycle paths to motorways). Then it's safe and convenient for cyclists and drivers don't have to overtake or interact with cyclists at all. Win-win!
The UK, US and possibly Australian failing was designating most existing streets for motor traffic first and last and maintaining the same level of access and connectivity for drivers as for when people were mostly on foot...
Perhaps this campaign should be added to the 'make wearing stab vests compulsory' campaign. This crash was entirely avoidable if the driver had not been impatient and stayed back until it was safer to overtake, or perhaps just not overtake. This poor kid might not have heard the car behind. True, a helmet 'might' have saved him but I seriously doubt it because a speeding car would have generated a force way in excess of what a 1" piece of polystyrene can protect from and his head hit a kerb. He would have got serious brain damage at the least, if he had survived. What would the campaign be then? This is why it must never be made a legal requirement to wear a helmet, because it will be used to get drivers off murder. Imagine a mugger getting off murder because their victim wasn't wearing a stab vest, and they'd also been stabbed in the neck?
"a speeding car would have generated a force way in excess of what a 1" piece of polystyrene can protect from and his head hit a kerb"
You know the specifics of the case, or are you just making something up? What force a "speeding car" will "generate" will be entirely dependent on the circumstances, as will the effect of an impact with a curb.
If you'd have bothered to read the article the kid suffered 2 impacts to his head hard enough to kill him and be picked up in an autopsy, one from the car and one from the curb. I think its fair to say that a lump of packing foam design to a standard thats protects against static drop test from head height would have made very little difference.
The lack of a helmet didnt kill him. The presence of car driver did.
No, the amount of force a car generates is simple physics using mass and speed in the calculation.
The lad suddenly moved out of 'his' lane. Presumably the (the court believes) the driver was not obliged to give 1.5m whilst overtaking because cyclists should be staying in their lane. The driver did not exceed 30mph and did not enter the cycle lane.
Yet the conversation is about helmets not how much better the Dutch would have designed this residential street.
If that's a current image of the actual place - broken white line - "advisory" cycle lane.
Meaning and effect: nothing. Total waste of cash on paint. Also note a car entirely legally parked in it*.
* Advice gone against because they're parked facing oncoming traffic for no valid reason, and of course they have also broken the law by driving on the footway but "prove it" means this is decriminalised...
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