Plans to make cycle helmets compulsory in the North.

Chips Lovell

These people?

monument

el tonto wrote: »

These people?

It seems to be mainly Headway who supported the NI bill.

tomasrojo

el tonto wrote: »

These people?

Almost certainly they were behind this.

FG will be quite willing to listen to this lot too. Going to be a tricky year.

I've heard from someone that this bill can expire if it isn't passed before the next Assembly elections. Not sure how true this is. It isn't passed yet anyway.

tomasrojo

monument wrote: »

It seems to be mainly Headway who supported the NI bill.

Headway and ABII are the same people.

tomasrojo

This was CTC's response when they heard it was in the pipeline.

http://www.ctc.org.uk/DesktopDefault.aspx?TabID=5480

This is a transcript of the debate:

http://www.niassembly.gov.uk/record/reports2010/110131.htm#j

tomasrojo

BTW, what are helmet-wearing rates like in NI?

Lawrence1895

A few interest groups in Germany launched a petition for making helmets compulsory in Germany in 2007 to the parliament. They failed. Maybe more success here, since I see loads of cyclists without a helmet

rubadub

CramCycle wrote: »

You can vote on his web page at http://www.patramsey.ie/

results there speak for themselves,

Should Cycle Helmets be Compulsary?

A bang on the head could badly offect the childrans speling obilities.

Mucco

tomasrojo wrote: »

This is a transcript of the debate:

http://www.niassembly.gov.uk/record/reports2010/110131.htm#j

All 2 hours 22 mins of the debate is available on BBC Democracy Live for those who have trouble sleeping.

tomasrojo

http://www.bikebiz.com/news/read/lid-law-voted-through-for-northern-ireland

The second stage of the Cyclists (Protective Headgear) Bill was passed by a margin of two votes, reported the BBC.
If it eventually becomes law - which, in all probability is unlikely - cyclists not wearing helmets will be liable for a £50 fine.

I do wonder how unlikely it is. I expect opposition will intensify now, and the margin by which the second stage was passed was narrow.

Lumen

tomasrojo wrote: »

This is a transcript of the debate:

http://www.niassembly.gov.uk/record/reports2010/110131.htm#j

Question put.

The Assembly divided: Ayes 20; Noes 18.

AYES

Mr Attwood, Mr D Bradley, Mrs M Bradley, Mr PJ Bradley, Mr Burns, Mr Callaghan , Mr Dallat, Dr Farry, Mr Gallagher, Mrs D Kelly, Mr Lunn, Mr A Maginness, Mr McCallister, Mr B McCrea, Mr McDevitt, Dr McDonnell, Mr McGlone, Mr P Ramsey, Ms Ritchie, Mr Wells.

Tellers for the Ayes: Mr PJ Bradley and Mr A Maginness.

NOES

Mr S Anderson , Mr Armstrong, Mr Bell, Mr Boylan, Mr Butler, Mr T Clarke, Mr Girvan, Mr Hamilton, Mr Kinahan, Miss McIlveen, Ms Ní Chuilín, Mr Poots, Ms S Ramsey, Mr G Robinson, Mr Ross, Ms Ruane, Mr Storey, Mr Weir.

Go Lance! w00t!

Jawgap

I see the co-inventor of the cycle helmet - Mr Bell - voted against. Shows how much faith he has in his product!

I take it his colleagues, Mr Giro, Mr MET and Ms Lazer, abstained:)

monument

This is easier to read and view who is talk and what party they are from: http://www.theyworkforyou.com/ni/?id=2011-01-31.9.1

monument

tomasrojo wrote: »

Almost certainly they were behind this.

FG will be quite willing to listen to this lot too. Going to be a tricky year.

I've heard from someone that this bill can expire if it isn't passed before the next Assembly elections. Not sure how true this is. It isn't passed yet anyway.

Many Labour TDs could too. But I think members of both parties would likely have split views.

Just remember, apparently more liberal parties can be the least liberal, these voted no: Alliance 2 members, UUP 2, DUP 1, and SDLP 15. Far more UUP and DUP members voted against it, and SF were the only ones to only vote against it.

It's by far an SDLP move.

tomasrojo

monument wrote: »

Many Labour TDs could too. But I think members of both parties would likely have split views.

Just remember, apparently more liberal parties can be the least liberal, these voted no: Alliance 2 members, UUP 2, DUP 1, and SDLP 15. Far more UUP and DUP members voted against it, and SF were the only ones to only vote against it.

It's by far an SDLP move.

Point taken. Similarly, the Democrats push helmet laws (bicycle and motorcycle) far harder in the USA than the Republicans.

Perhaps Andrew Montague would be an important figure in shaping Labour opinion against compulsion. He's well informed, and he has the success of the bike-share scheme as an example of what would be imperilled by such a law.

It looks as if Headway are going to be a thorn in the side of utility cycling for quite some time to come anyway.

niceonetom

The former president of the IMO is calling for that body advocate mandatory helmet usage.

It occasionally scares me quite how much unquestioning respect we pay to doctors on issues they are not directly trained in - it's like a relic of the way the opinions of the clergy used to be treated. If I have a medical problem I want a doctor, but when it comes to policy making, weighing the broader societal effect of policy I think they're given entirely too much credence.

tomasrojo

I think one major problem is that most medical people have trouble understanding statistics, and often prefer "expert testimony", which is when all is said and done, just opinion.

I'm not saying they can't understand statistics, for whatever reason they don't have a good grasp of it.

For example:

http://www.badscience.net/2005/06/vital-statistics/

So, on to Professor Roy Meadows and Meadows’ Law, that: “One sudden infant death is a tragedy, two is suspicious and three is murder until proved otherwise.” Pay attention: flaky statistics can get you jailed, or erased from the GMC register if you’re not careful. Meadows said the likelihood of there being two sudden infant deaths in the same family was one in 73 million. People are queueing up to point out that the Royal Statistical Society said this aspect of the case involved flaky reasoning. Nobody in newspapers was geeky enough to explain why.

Meadows appears to have taken a figure for sudden infant death syndrome (Sids), about one in 8,500, and squared it to find the likelihood of Sids happening twice in the same family. This would only be valid if we could be sure Sids always happened by chance and independently of family factors such as genetics and environment. In fact, there are strong reasons to believe that there are, unknown, genetic and environmental factors which will make Sids more likely in any child, and since genetic factors and environment tend to be shared in families, you may be more likely to find Sids twice in the same family than the initial calculation suggests. The error in the figure 73m is therefore likely to be extremely large, and in one direction only, that is, overestimating. The true figure may be much less incriminating.

What the jury ought to have considered is: which is the more likely rare event, double murder or double Sids? If anything we want the relative probabilities. The original case did not consider this; if it had, you would have thought a conviction to be less likely. The appeal court ruling accepted flaws with the figure, but said it established “a very broad point, namely the rarity of double Sids”. Scream now.

If you want to know whether a treatment really works, or a phenomenon really exists, ask a statistician, not a doctor.

Chips Lovell

LOL at the last comment on that piece:

Hooray for the helmet champions!

Not only should it be law to wear a helmet but also bicycles SHOULD be subjected to an NCT (NBT), just like any other mechanically propelled vehicle. How many catastrophic injuries could have been avoided if the back brakes had been working?

There should also be a law that all bicycles should be fitted with carriers… you might think it is funny but these devices are simple to install and they actually save lives! I personally have seen too many people (older people who should have more sense) carrying the messages hanging from the handlebars, which to my mind is a recipe for total disaster.

Well done to all the safety conscious doctors out there. I sleep better at nights knowing you are thinking of me… and my bicycle, of course!

Marcus

tomasrojo

Also:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1245921/?page=1

The statistical knowledge of most doctors is so limited that they cannot be expected to draw the right conclusions from those statistical analyses which are found in medical journals.

niceonetom

tomasrojo wrote: »

For example:

http://www.badscience.net/2005/06/vital-statistics/

That was written by a doctor and therefore is true.

Lumen

niceonetom wrote: »

It occasionally scares me quite how much unquestioning respect we pay to doctors on issues they are not directly trained in - it's like a relic of the way the opinions of the clergy used to be treated.

I'm all for rejection of appeals to authority, but I think maybe you're overextending yourself just a wee bit there.

niceonetom

Lumen wrote: »

I'm all for rejection of appeals to authority, but I think maybe you're overextending yourself just a wee bit there.

How so?

edit: could this be a cultural difference? Maybe you don't get the way the priest and doctor were both unimpeachable in traditional Irish life until quite recently. Now, the priest is treated with mild suspicion (ok, and deference) by most, but to many the doctor's word is still, ahem, gospel.

tomasrojo

Incidentally, I used to work as a research assistant in Biology, and most biologists, in my experience, even though they do statistical courses as undergraduates, also do not understand in any depth the statistical techniques they use every time they publish a research paper.

There's something about the human brain that renders most people incapable of understanding probability. Or maybe just leaves most people disinclined to engage with it.

Lumen

niceonetom wrote: »

How so?

Both statistics and medicine are rational professions. All doctors have basic statistical training. They may have forgotten it, but they were at least taught it.

Theology is a willfully irrational discipline, and therefore the radius of its sphere of rational expertise is precisely zero.

niceonetom

Lumen wrote: »

Both statistics and medicine are rational professions. All doctors have basic statistical training. They may have forgotten it, but they were at least taught it.

Theology is a willfully irrational discipline, and therefore the radius of its sphere of rational expertise is precisely zero.

Read my edit above to further gain insight into the brilliant analogy I was drawing.

Also, because someone has training in a rational, reality based, discipline does not automatically bestow them with some overarching insight into all areas of reality. We're all prone to subjective evidence, and doctors are subjected to very misleading evidence just by the nature of their work.

There's no reason why doctors should be taken any more seriously than say, chemists, or physicists or whatever when it comes to opinions on policy, statistics or the price of rice - their authority seems to stem from the perception of the profession as part of the intellectual elite and, I think, from the fact in the public perception the profession has accrued a sort of ju-ju magical control over life and death (are a likely to be called upon in both events - just like priests).

tomasrojo

Indeed, Philip Larkin made use of this similarity in his very fine poem Days:

What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.

Undercover Elephant

niceonetom wrote: »

There's no reason why doctors should be taken any more seriously than say, chemists, or physicists or whatever when it comes to opinions on policy, statistics or the price of rice - their authority seems to stem from the perception of the profession as part of the intellectual elite and, I think, from the fact in the public perception the profession has accrued a sort of ju-ju magical control over life and death (are a likely to be called upon in both events - just like priests).

There are two separate issues:
(1) What do the statistics say?
(2) What policy should be implemented having regard to those statistics?

I'd say that most people don't grasp either of these questions.

The woolly working assumption on the first is that doctors know more about the cause of head injuries than anyone else. This is false. They know no more than anyone else with access to the statistics.

There's absolutely no reason to suppose that doctors should have a greater say than hairdressers on what to do with those statistics, but this question rarely gets asked in the first place.

niceonetom

I'm hoping there'll be some sort of fight between the acquired-brain-injury doctors advocating helmet laws and a coalition of cardiologists, nephrologists and obesity specialists who don't. They might cancel each other out and leave us alone.

Actually, I wonder if there's any statistical basis on which I could argue that a reduction in the number of cyclists due to the introduction of a mandatory helmet law would actually increase the total number of brain injuries in the population due to the increased likelihood of stroke among the sedentary... unforeseen consequences and all that.

Lumen

niceonetom wrote: »

Actually, I wonder if there's any statistical basis on which I could argue that a reduction in the number of cyclists due to the introduction of a mandatory helmet law would actually increase the total number of brain injuries in the population due to the increased likelihood of stroke among the sedentary... unforeseen consequences and all that.

I prefer the pragmatic arguments which do not require statistical or medical training, like LEAVE ME THE HELL ALONE!

Many things are provably dangerous but perfectly legal. The state should not legislate against self-harming behaviours.

tomasrojo

niceonetom wrote: »

I'm hoping there'll be some sort of fight between the acquired-brain-injury doctors advocating helmet laws and a coalition of cardiologists, nephrologists and obesity specialists who don't. They might cancel each other out and leave us alone.

Actually, I wonder if there's any statistical basis on which I could argue that a reduction in the number of cyclists due to the introduction of a mandatory helmet law would actually increase the total number of brain injuries in the population due to the increased likelihood of stroke among the sedentary... unforeseen consequences and all that.

I think so. Given that the only clear trend to come from MHL jurisdictions is that cycling participation (bar sports cycling) goes down, clearly physical activity is diminished by such laws, with inevitable rise in strokes and heart disease. How much is debatable, but Australia is in very bad shape physically. Most obese nation in the world now.

A recent report is quite apocalyptic in its language:

The participation of 12,000 students in years eight to 11 across 237 schools provides the first truly national sample for a physical activity survey of young Australians since 1985.

Key findings:

• One in four students are overweight or obese, with a significantly higher rate in low SES areas.
• Eighty-five per cent of students don’t engage in sufficient activity to provide a health benefit.

Cancer Council Australia CEO, Professor Ian Olver, said the findings confirmed what health experts had been saying for years, that poor nutrition and inadequate exercise were contributing to an unprecedented number of overweight and obese adolescents and a “chronic disease time bomb”.

http://www.cancer.org.au/Newsmedia/mediareleases/mediareleases2011/9February2011.htm


One infuriating thing about all this is that compulsionists haven't even shown that cycling is unusually productive of head injuries. It's all anecdotes about individual cases they use to tug the heart strings. In other words, they show about the same intellectual rigour as homeopathists.