Hats off to bike-sharing

Wednesday, 3rd February 2010

Keith Austin wonders whether cities such as Sydney should brace themselves for an epidemic of head lice

Well, yes, according to Gordon Oakley, an RACV bigwig who recently told the Financial Review that organisations could buy a corporate membership of Melbourne’s much awaited bike-share scheme and then share 12-20 helmets among them.

Given that the American Bicycle Helmet Safety Institute (BHSI) says school outbreaks of head lice ‘have been traced to the use of a single batting helmet for softball players’, this doesn’t seem like the brightest of ideas; within a week they’d be up to their ears in nits.

The BHSI says this can be avoided by using cheap surgical caps under the helmets. Perhaps each bike docking station could be equipped with a dispenser. Or — kill two birds with one stone — a condom machine. Though they would have to come with a ‘Use Only Once’ warning for the congenitally stupid, or the head lice might start to migrate south.

It’s certainly a head-scratching problem, but before we get too carried away with trivialities, let’s not forget that everybody, everywhere in the universe, looks like a prat in a hat, let alone a giant condom. Put Angelina Jolie in a cycle helmet and she’d look like nothing more than (apologies to Dr Seuss) a trout with a pout. In Paris, or Montreal, or Berlin, or Amsterdam, you can step out of the hairdresser looking fabulous, jump on a bike and arrive at a party still looking fabulous; here you arrive with helmet head.

No bike share scheme been successfully launched in a country with mandatory helmet-wearing laws. The only answer would be repeal, but despite the many upsides (a mathematical model published last year by Piet de Jong, a professor of actuarial studies at Macquarie University, suggested that the helmet laws cost Australia more than $500 million every year in health and non-health costs) it’s an itch that politicians will never scratch in the Australian nanny state. Still, it could provide more jobs in the health sector: an army of Nitty Noras would be needed to contain the outbreaks.

Keith Austin is a former travel editor and restaurant columnist at the Sydney Morning Herald.