Some of the Wollondilly Community Health Staff and BARBUG members who Participated in 2011 Ride To Work

For their efforts the community health centre won the Community Health category for the highest proportion of staff participating in the Local Health Districts Ride to Work Day Awards!

Bargo Bicycle User Group members with staff from the Wollondilly Community Health Centre receiving their award from the Health Promotion Service of South Western and Sydney Local Health District.

Cycling has many health benefits like fitness, weight and stress management; environment benefits; fun and a great opportunity to meet new people.

The Bargo BUG organise rides and cycling activities in and around Wollondilly. The rides are open to anyone with a roadworthy bike and a helmet.  We encourage new riders to join and learn to ride with confidence. Children under 14 must be accompanied by an adult.

For more details contact Bargo BUG on Ph 4684 1444

Austcycle, Australia’s national provider of accredited cycle training will be on hand to help improve your skills.

You will learn about conducting a basic bicycle check, learning the correct riding positions, braking, balancing and cornering, changing gears, riding on hills, stopping and turning.

After the demonstration, a short ride around Picton Botanic Gardens, followed by a sausage sizzle lunch.
Sponsored by the Rotary Club of Picton

Picton Botanic Gardens

Where: Picton Botanic gardens

When: Saturday 5th November 2011

Start: 9:am

To register please contact Beverly Garrick, Sydney South West area Health Service on 4683 6025
or Leanne Ledwidge, Wollondilly Shire Council on 4677 1188

Choke point: Tahmoor cyclist Alan Willock has been advocating for a cycle network in Wollondilly for the last three years. Picture: Jonathan Ng

Living in Wollondilly means spending at least 100 minutes travelling every day, according to Transport Data Centre statistics. Michael Cox reports.
Wollondilly has the worst transport record among its regional neighbours, statistics from the Transport Data Centre’s 2007 household travel survey show.
The average resident spends more than 100 minutes in travelling time each day compared to Wingecarribee residents who travel just over an hour, according to the most recent figures available.
On average each Wollondilly household owns more than two cars.
Wingecarribee residents own less than one car per household.
Wollondilly Council has allocated an extra $100,000 towards developing a bicycle network for commuters, recreational users and families in this year’s budget to provide alternative transport measures.
Areas where cyclists need to merge into through traffic are referred to as “choke points”. And Wollondilly Council’s infrastructure and planning manager Dick Webb said Wollondilly had too many of them for cycling to become an alternative form of transport at the moment.
Cycle works recently finished on Remembrance Drive Tahmoor cost more than $150,000 to construct.
Mr Webb said the shared cycleway was one part of making Wollondilly more cycle-friendly.
He said support infrastructure including bike racks and toilet and shower facilities would be ideal.
Mr Webb said the council was considering merging its Alternative Transport Committee, Transport Forum and the Economic Advisory Group’s sub-Transport Committee into one transport advisory group.
The amalgamation means a wider range of alternative and public transport problems may be addressed and a focus could be placed on establishing shared cycleways.
“There will be less duplication across three groups,” Mr Webb said.
“Remembrance Drive has been historically not designed for cyclists,” he said.
A member of the Bargo cycling group BarBugs, Alan Willock, said he avoided using Remembrance Drive because he had a close call with two buses.
The 56-year-old Tahmoor man said he would prefer to ride via Thirlmere to get to Picton than to ride his bike on Remembrance Drive.
The transport committee is focusing on establishing a Picton/Tahmoor route for bicycles because the road was not wide enough for cyclists.
“People say they’d love to cycle but they’re too scared to get on the road — and I don’t blame them,” he said.
Mr Willock said the state and federal governments needed to contribute more to cycle networks.
“Councils can’t afford to put paths like this one (Tahmoor’s new path on Remembrance Drive) on every road,” he said.

Tweeted by: @roadcc: This is superb! Found on Shutt VR’s site who in turn found it on Carlton Reid’s www.quickrelease.tv

An invisible airbag for cyclists’ head, shaped as a collar worn around the neck has won one of the world’s largest monetary prize for design.

To see full story go to: The Telegraph.co.uk

Tweeted by: @CyclingRightNow

What terrific news!

Friday, 12 August 2011

Men’s National Road Series – Goulburn to Sydney, September 18-19, 2011.

The New South Wales State Government will partner the historic 170km Goulburn to Sydney (Camden) Cycle Classic (est 1902) which will be hosted by the Macarthur Collegians Cycling Club on the 17th & 18th of September promoting the Goulburn Mulwaree, Wollondilly, Camden and Campbelltown regions to a broader Australia wide audience.
State member for Wollondilly, Jai Rowell has lobbied for $20,000 funding assistance from the Premier’s department to continue the history of this iconic sporting event that has assisted many Australian cyclists as a stepping stone to their international careers. Cycling has been receiving world-wide recognition since the victorious salute of Australian Tour de France winner Cadel Evans in Paris last month.

“New South Wales has an event that is older than the Tour de France and we have a unique opportunity to use sport to promote our towns and show off our area.

The event ambassador, Simon Poidevin has led the push to raising over $800,000 that has assisted our local charities like the Odyssey House Drug & Alcohol Rehabilitation Centre Families Programme, the Kids of Macarthur Health Foundation ,Youth Solutions and Goulburn’s Palliative Care,” Member for Wollondilly Jai Rowell said.

The race has a unique history starting in Goulburn, Australia’s first inland city and finishing in the birthplace of Australia’s wool, wine and wheat industries, the historic town of Camden.

This year a short time trial will be held at Goulburns’ Victoria Park from 11am on Saturday the 17th of September with the historic 170km classic commencing on Sunday the 18th of September at 7.45am.

The historic race departs Goulburn and follows the Hume Highway to Berrima and passes through Mittagong, Bargo, Tahmoor, Picton and the Razorback Range before finishing to a friendly Camden welcome at 11.15am.

Media enquiries: Simon Poidevin 0411 206 790 – Paul Hillbrick 0412 842 730.

In August 2011 the City of Sydney released four films celebrating the personal stories of people who ride bicycles in Sydney. The films will be shown in local cinemas starting in late August. The City used real people for the campaign, each person featured had contacted the City to express their thanks for the new cycleways. The resulting films have high production values and are a real reflection of Sydney’s diverse bike-riding population.

Everything’s Connected — Kitiya

Everything’s Connected – Caroline

Everything’s Connected – Anthony

Everything’s Connected – Les and Judy

Original Material: Cycle Resource Centre

European women love to get on their bikes. kamshots/Flickr

Cycling for transport in Australia is characterised by several “missing” population groups: women, children, adolescents and older adults.

Women comprise about one-fifth of commuter cyclists in Australia. In countries such as the Netherlands, Denmark and Japan, more women than men travel by bike.

There has been considerable speculation about why cycling for transport in Australia is less socially inclusive than in a number of other industrialised countries. For women, explanations have centred on time constraints, household responsibilities, and concerns about traffic hazards and personal safety.

While all these factors undoubtedly play a role, a recent analysis of international comparative data adds another perspective. It has found that women ride bikes for transport when the environment is friendly to cycling.

Make cycling safe, convenient and fast, and women will do it

Whether you look at national, city or local government area data, when bike riding makes up a bigger proportion of trips, the proportion of women cycling also increases.

City level data is shown in the graph below. It shows that the measures that make cycling generally appealing are those that are particularly important for women: safety, convenience and fast travel time for the short to medium-distance trips that characterise urban living.

Bicycle mode share of trips and percentage of female cyclists, large cities.

Traffic safety, in particular, is a key factor for addressing gender equity in cycling. Concerns about safety are a major barrier to cycling in Australia, and a greater barrier for women than men.

While actual injury risk is important from a road safety perspective, subjective risk perceptions appear to be more important in shaping cycling behaviour, particularly for women.

Cycling injury data in Australia and the UK indicate that women are actually at lower risk of a traffic-related cycling injury than men, particularly for the more severe injuries. However, consistent with gender differences in risk aversion in general, women are both more concerned about safety and more affected by safety concerns.

Relative to men, women prefer to use cycling routes where they can get further away from motor vehicle traffic. They are also more likely to go out of their way to use a safer route, and to cycle more cautiously in traffic.

In Australia, road safety is about cars

While Australia is among the world leaders in road traffic safety in general, the focus has been on protecting motor vehicle occupants. Cycling safety has been relatively neglected.

Serious injury rates for cyclists in Australia are increasing. They are several times higher than fatality and injury rates in the high-cycling industrialised countries of Europe and Asia.

In Australia, efforts to increase cycling and improve the safety of cyclists have focussed on separating cyclists from motorists. Investment in cycling infrastructure has been ad hoc and inadequate.

Older women have gone missing in the Australian cycling population. (marcusuke/Flickr)

Effective cycling safety measures that potentially affect motor vehicle flow are avoided. There has also been a misplaced reliance on the “safety in numbers” concept whereby cycling supposedly becomes safer as more people cycle, due to factors such as higher visibility.

Countries such as the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany and Japan take a different approach. If you’re making a short to medium trip in an urban area, they encourage you to ride a bike.

These countries have consistently implemented a range of transport, traffic safety and urban planning measures that systematically prioritise cycling over car travel for these trips.

Measures include establishing an extensive network of high quality bicycle routes that provide:

• good separation from motor vehicle traffic where appropriate
• good management of interactions between bicycles and cars where complete separation is not feasible.

How do “high-cycling” countries do it?

There are many policies aimed at improving the ways cyclists and drivers interact.

Intersection treatments can provide safe flow for both bicycles and cars. Extensive traffic-calmed urban areas with speed limits of 30 km/h or less make cycling more appealing.

Road safety measures consistently make the safety of cyclists more important than keeping motor vehicles moving. For example, car drivers have the legal responsibility to avoid collisions with cyclists and pedestrians. The principle is that the responsibility for injury prevention lies with the operator of the vehicle that can cause most harm.

Bikes need to take their place as another form of transport. (Mikael Colville-Andersen)

Because of these measures, cycling environments are both safe and pleasant. Cyclists rarely experience the hazardous and unpleasant interactions with motorists that characterise cycling in countries such as Australia and the USA.

It is important to recognise that these high-cycling countries are not “anti-car”; rather, they provide a more level playing field for a wider range of ways of travelling.

As in Australia, motorways and arterial roads provide for high-speed, high-volume motorised travel between major population centres. But transport and urban planning measures make cycling faster and more convenient than car travel within cities, towns and suburbs.

It’s not just regulation that makes cycling more appealing for women, children and older adults. In high-cycling countries, people are more likely to use bicycles appropriate for everyday travel – more upright bikes, in other words. Their bikes have a bigger carrying capacity (so you can take your children and do your shopping), and it’s normal to ride in everyday clothing rather than sports gear (including to work).

Because of these measures, cycling is seen as a convenient form of everyday travel for everyone, rather than a vigorous form of sport and exercise that is more appealing to young to middle-aged men.

Australia’s path forward

In countries like Australia, where few women cycle for transport, many of the factors described above are either lacking or only partly addressed.

More people, and more women, would cycle if we prioritised bicycle travel over car travel for many of the daily trips that are part of urban life. Think of the short trips you make everyday that could be on a bike if cycling was easier: taking the kids to school, picking up some things at the shop, going to work or to the gym.

Urban environments designed for safe, enjoyable bicycle travel are quite unlike those where cycling is simply tacked on to the “real transport business” of moving cars as quickly as possible at all times in all locations.

The evidence shows that as bicycle travel becomes a convenient, safe and enjoyable everyday transport option, increasing numbers of girls, adolescents and adult women will almost certainly go along for the ride.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.

Is there a question?

There is a lot of discussion lately about helmet wearing.

Some say our mandatory helmet legislation discourages people riding a bike, and that if we want the health benefits of a large percentage of folk riding, it is better to abandon the helmet rules. Many doctors also believe in this argument.

Of course, the other side of the story is that head injuries are greatly reduced in a helmet wearing population.

With the rise of social, urban bicycling which occurs mainly on dedicated cycle-paths at sedate speeds, I think there may be an argument for not wearing a helmet.
However, for me that is where the story ends. I live in Wollondilly, a semi-rural shire south-west of Sydney that is magic for cycling. Our cash-strapped council has difficulty maintaining the roads in our vast shire, and although cycling infrastructure is on the agenda, it will be many many years before there are cycling shoulders, little alone cycle-ways throughout the shire!
I wear a helmet, and like wearing a seat belt in a car, it feels wrong if I’m not wearing one when cycling. It was even strange when I first attended a spin-class not to wear one!

Riding at speed on road or in the bush on a mountain bike, where I fall off far more frequently, would be personal madness NOT to wear a helmet. Sure it would be lovely to feel the wind in my hair, but I’d much prefer NOT end up in the brain surgery ward.

Being the secretary of BARBUG, I meet many cyclists who ride with us either regularly or on a visiting ride. Over the last few years there has been 5 incidents that have reinforced my need to wear a helmet.

1. A friend’s daughter was a very keen triathlete. She was training in the Blue Mountains and was hit from behind by a car traveling in the same direction. Her injuries were quite serious, and she was in hospital for many months. She did incur brain injury, but her doctors said that if she had not been wearing a helmet she would not have survived. As it was, she could go back to practicing law within a year.
2. One of our group was riding with two others in the rain to my place. Her front wheel slipped on a ridge between the shoulder and road. She came down onto the road. Thankfully a truck was able to swerve around her, so, although frightening, it was not a serious accident. A kindly passing driver popped her bike in his ute and gave her a lift to my house. Apart from being shaken, she was none the worse for her incident. I gave her a  cup of strong, sweet tea and we talked about how lucky she was. We did not realise just how lucky! On examination of her helmet she found it was cracked right through! Caroline did not even think she had struck her head when she fell!
   This accident may not have killed her, but without the helmet she would have quite a serious head injury.
3. 4. & 5. All are similar to Caroline’s story. Accidents which resulted in minor scrapes and abrasions and in one case a broken collarbone, but in EVERY  case the riders were not aware they had hit their heads’, and yet their helmets were damaged or cracked through.

I’m no spring chicken, and glamor was never my thing, but it seems to me that if your interest is looking good as well as riding, a little injenuity is required. There are some nice looking helmets and helmet covers available.

H1 Design Cycle Headdress

H1Design Cycle Headdress

Looking Good in a Helmet

Well Ventilated Pretty Helmet

Helmets must comply with the Australian Standard, which unfotunately limits our choice.
There are many brands available at your local bike shop, however although designed for brain safety and maximum air-flow, they are not considered cool in urban cycling terms.

Nutcase helmets comply to Aussie standard and are becoming accepted as urban head-ware. They come in lots of colours and fun patterns.

Nutcase?

Nutcase Helmets

There is a European brand called Yakkay, which is a basic helmet, that comes with a choice of many different covers to suit every occasion. Unfortunately they do not as yet comply with Australian Standards, which is a great pity.

Yakkay Helmet and Cover

Yakkay Helmets and Covers

Until such time that cycle-ways are widespread and urban cycling does not require interaction with traffic, helmets are a necessary evil.
For the many other cycling disciplines, that require high-speed and risk, helmets should always be mandatory.

12th May 2011
Author: Max Cameron
Principal Research Fellow at Monash University

If helmets protect against brain injury, why not wear them?

Convincing more Australians to get on a bike would undoubtedly deliver health improvements that come with reduced waistlines. But ditching bike helmets isn’t the answer.

The health benefits of more cycling would need to be multiplied countless times before they could offset the loss of life and health harms caused by serious head injury.

Benefits of helmets

Bicycle helmets have long been recognised as the best protection against head injury. As far back as 1977, Standards Australia approved a helmet design for cyclists to reduce their risk of head injury.

Throughout the 1980s the Victorian Government promoted cycling and encouraged the use of helmets with a bulk-purchase subsidy scheme, compulsory helmets for the schools Bike Ed program, a television and radio campaign, and a $10 per helmet rebate on purchases each December from 1984 to 1988.

Observational surveys show that the campaigns worked and helmet use grew each year in the 1980s, mostly among primary school children and also in teen and adult commuting cyclist groups.

As helmet use grew, the risk of head injuries reduced. The number of cyclists killed or hospitalised with head injuries reduced by about a third in the 1980s.

The number of other injuries actually increased, though it’s not surprising given there were greater numbers of cyclists on the road.

When the Victorian compulsory helmet laws passed on 1 July 1990, helmet wearing rates more than doubled — from around a third to three quarters — by March 1991. The increase was smaller for primary school children, who were already avid helmet-wearers.

Rates of cyclist head injury fell by 48% and 70% during the first and second years of the law.

It’s been suggested that helmet laws contributed little to the reduced injury rate, and that Victorian cyclists benefited most from road safety improvements, such as random breath testing, speed camera enforcement and supporting mass-media campaigns.

These initiatives may explain some of the reduction in the total number of cyclists killed and hospitalised during the early 1990s.

But the additional reduction in head injuries in the first two years of the law was consistent with the rise of helmet-wearing in those years.

Cyclist rates

So, there’s no doubt that mandatory helmet laws reduced head injury and improved cyclist safety. The problem is that it also reduced rates of cycling in some groups.

Teenage cycling decreased by 43% and 46% in the first and second years of the law. Rates of primary school student cyclists also dropped slightly.

But it wasn’t all bad news.

More adults began cycling after the introduction of mandatory helmet laws. Adult bicycle use increased by 88% from 1987/1988 to 1991, and doubled by 1992.

Overall bicycle use had increased by 9% in 1991 and by a further 3% in 1992.

So focusing on reduced bicycle use by teenagers, and to a lesser extent by younger children, gives a misleading impression of the overall impact of the helmet law on bicycle use.

New generations of cyclists

It’s interesting to speculate on what would happen if helmet laws were repealed.

Because the bicycle-use surveys weren’t repeated throughout the 1990s, we won’t ever know if helmet laws continued to discourage cycling.

If they did, we would have to ask whether repealing the law would increase cycling and bring about sufficient health improvements to offset the increased risk of head injury.

Valuing the benefits of exercise through cycling is outside my area of expertise. And I am yet to see a full analysis of these benefits comparable to an objective analysis of the costs of increased cyclist trauma, especially head injuries.

But failing to prevent serious trauma on our roads isn’t just a transport problem or even a public health issue — it’s both an ethical and economic dilemma.

Investment in preventing a road death is now valued at about $6 million in the National Road Safety Strategy. A serious head injury resulting in permanent brain damage, which a bicycle helmet can often prevent, could cost our health system a lot more.

More than two decades after they came into effect, it is likely that cyclists — and parents of child cyclists — have accepted that helmet wearing is a normal part of cycling.

Only those who are ideologically opposed to their legal obligation to protect themselves would choose not to wear a helmet.

What’s clear is that our community values preventing road deaths and serious injuries much higher than it did in the past.

Ultimately, the health benefits of increased bicycle exercise have a long way to go before they can offset the increased costs of cyclist death and serious head injury.

Chris Rissel from the University of Sydney kicked off The Conversation’s debate about mandatory bike helmet laws in March, when he said ditching helmets would encourage more people to get on a bike and get to fit. Read his article here

Continue the conversation in the comments field below:
Should mandatory helmet laws be maintained to protect cyclists against serious head injury?

References:

Cameron, MH, Vulcan, AP, Finch, CF, and Newstead, SV. Mandatory bicycle helmet use following a decade of helmet promotion in Victoria, Australia – An evaluation. Accident Analysis and Prevention, 1994, 26(3), 325-337.

Wood, T, and Milne, P. Head injuries to pedal cyclists and the promotion of helmet use in Victoria, Australia. Accident Analysis and Prevention, 1988, 20(3), 177-185.

This article was originally published at The Conversation.
Read the original article.