Category Archives: regulation

e-Rideables Crackdown in WA

cycling, Health, regulation, Safety, , ,

Teenagers on a fat bikeIn the lead up to Christmas 2025, the NSW government announced a number of regulatory changes to the sale of e-Bikes, including reduced motor size, maximum top boosted speeds, and the application of throttles. This was in addition to an announcement of revised Federal import restrictions made earlier in the year.

The NSW Government is yet to announce how the regulations will be enforced in NSW.

However, Western Australia appears to be taking an aggressive approach to enforcement, with WA Police urging parents to closely monitor their children’s use of e-rideables, after an operation in Perth saw dozens of juveniles charged and multiple electric scooters and off-road bikes seized and destroyed.

Operation Moorhead was launched in response to community concern about dangerous and anti-social riding behaviour.

Read more at ABC News >>>

Cyclists’ injuries at record high, riders blame aggressive motorists

cycling, Health, regulation, Safety

Safe passing signA record number of NSW cyclists – 2330 – were taken to hospital in 2021, the most since complete hospital records began to be collected in 2005.

Cyclist David Page has experienced at least 12 serious incidents of dangerous driving and abuse from motorists while on the road in Sydney.

“If you want to kill someone, do it with a car because you will always get off,” said Page, a doctor who lives near Turramurra.

Bike riders now represent about one in four (23 per cent) of road crash hospitalisations, and are the only road user group to report increasing injury numbers recently.

From 2005 to 2021, 173 bicyclists were killed and 29,464 were seriously injured on the state’s roads. However, many of these injuries were not reported to police and did not involve another vehicle, Transport for NSW said.

In the 12 months to the end of January 2023, 20 fines were issued to drivers in NSW for breaking the minimum passing distance rule, but none in the Christmas holiday period of December and January despite several statewide traffic blitzes.

In comparison, since 2016, cyclists have received about 55,000 fines for a range of offences, mostly for not wearing a helmet or not having it correctly fastened (31,402 penalties), riding on the footpath (5645 fines), riding at night without a light (5678) and not having a working bell (2476). There have also been 207 fines for “not ride on far-left side of road”.

Read more (SMH) >>>

Cycling fines soar

cycling, regulation, Safety, , , ,

Cycling FinesMost of us have heard recently about warnings issued by police to local riders for rolling through STOP signs.

The SMH reports that the number of fines handed to cyclists in NSW has surged by more than a third in the first year of increased penalties, which has led to the state government collecting more than $2.2 million in revenue from the top-five offences.

Almost two-thirds of the 9760 infringement notices issued in the 12 months after the new laws were introduced were for failing to wear helmets, the fine for which quadrupled to $319 on March 1 last year.

Read more at the SMH >>>

Bike helmet review throws cold water on sceptics: they’ll likely save your life

cycling, Health, regulation, Safety, , , , ,

From the Sydney Morning Herald…

Cycling HelmetTampere, Finland: The largest review yet of bike helmet use by 64,000 injured cyclists worldwide has found helmets reduce the chances of a serious head injury by nearly 70 per cent.

Claims that bike helmets damaged the neck and caused serious brain injury were also found to be wrong in the study by University of NSW statistician Dr Jake Olivier, who presented on Tuesday to the international injury prevention conference Safety 2016 in Finland.

Surge in number of fines for cyclists not wearing a helmet

cycling, Health, regulation, ,

From the Sydney Morning Herald….

The number of infringement notices issued by police has risen dramatically following a recent crack down on cyclists who do not wear approved helmets.

cyclist-fines-graph-700

The latest statistics show a 56 per cent rise, to 1545, in the total number of fines issued in the two months after the government increased penalties for cyclists on March 1, compared with the same period a year earlier. 

The fine for riding without a helmet more than quadrupled on March 1 to $319.

The amount of fines collected from people riding without helmets totalled $350,262 in March and April, compared with just over $50,000 in the same period in 2015.

 

New rules for cyclists – 2016

cycling, regulation, , ,

The NSW government has announced new rules relating to cycling. These new measures will come into effect in March 2016.

1 MetreFrom 1st March 2016….

 

Changing attitudes to bicycle helmets

cycling, regulation

Cycling HelmetThere is currently a great deal of public discussion about laws relating to the wearing of helmets by cyclists.

In the early 1990s laws mandating that cyclists wear bicycle helmets were introduced in Australia. But as early as 1978 attitudes towards the wearing of helmets were changing.

The article below, published in today’s SMH, is part of that discussion, reflecting on changing attitudes since the late 1970s.