BREAKING: Irish road safety bosses to abandon cycling helmet and high-vis push

IrishCycle.com can exclusively reveal that promoting helmets and high-vis for people who cycle will be dropped from Irish road safety policy.

“There’s just too many studies showing that helmets and high-vis are ineffective and maybe even counter-productive,” said one source.

He explained that they will still advice some users to wear helmets: “Users who are engaging in extreme sport-type cycling, those who are unstable on two wheels, or those engaged in high-risk cycling might be or feel better if they keep wearing helmets.”

“High risk cycling excludes most cycling commutes. But in the future cyclists with high-vis and a helmet will be allowed to break red lights and cycle on motorways — but those remain illegal for now,” he said.

The source said that nobody would admit the the helmet and high-vis promotion policy was the waste of time he said it “clearly has been” but the policy will be quietly dropped over time.

“Rather than wasting time and resources on victim blaming, policy will now focus on the elephants in the room — namely, poor driver behavior and the on-going poor road and street design,” the source said this morning, April 1.


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4 comments

  1. Baring the date in mind, I do think helmets and high-vis are useless for most cyclist and I’ve never worn them in 40+ years of cycling and never will. So if this would be a true policy, I would fully support it. The best protection is better roads, driver awareness and many more cyclists on the road so everyone gets used to them. I also support breaking red lights under certain conditions (as is done in Belgium). I have to draw the line at cycling on motorways although on most there is plenty of space in the left lane.

    Reply
  2. You almost had me there ;-)
    Want so much for sanity to be reached dropping any plans for mandatory helmet use that I nearly missed the April fools joke!

    Reply

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