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news
Helmet child “We want to make people who don’t wear helmets look the stupid ones”: Sister of teenage cyclist killed in collision with overtaking driver calls for mandatory cycle helmet law
The sister of a teenage cyclist who was killed after being struck by an overtaking driver, causing him to hit his head on a kerb, has called on the government to make wearing a helmet while cycling a legal requirement, telling her school assembly that “I just wish my big brother had a helmet on” the night he died.
A road safety expert, meanwhile, has responded to the youngster’s campaign by noting that, while cycle helmets can lessen the risk of traumatic brain injury in a collision, they “alone do not prevent crashes from happening” and that safer infrastructure is key to preventing fatal collisions.
> Why is Dan Walker’s claim that a bike helmet saved his life so controversial?
15-year-old Riley Ketley was cycling with friends to the shops in the Yorkshire village of Molescroft, Beverley, on 8 April 2021 when he was struck from behind by a motorist who had allegedly “sped up” to overtake the group. Riley suffered a serious head injury in the crash and died hours later in hospital.
“There was just no saving him. He had a head injury to the front of his head and a head injury to the back. He’d hit the car the front ways and he’d hit the back of it on the kerb,” Riley’s mum VJ told the BBC today.
At the inquest which followed the teenager’s death, a friend who was cycling behind Ketley – who had been told he had been accepted into the Royal Marines earlier that day – told investigators that he had pulled out into the middle of the road, as the driver of a Honda Civic “sped up as if overtaking”, leading to the collision.
The motorist, who said he felt “absolutely terrible” about the incident, claimed that he’d moved to the right to give the youngsters as much room as hospital, the Yorkshire Post reported in 2022. He said the group had seen him and moved over to the adjacent cycle lane, when Riley pulled out.
“There was absolutely no warning at all, and I had no chance to stop and avoid a collision,” the driver told the inquest.
After extensive inquiries, the police concluded that there was insufficient evidence to charge the motorist, with a forensic collision investigator determining that there was no evidence of excessive speed and that the crash was “unavoidable”.
And this week, Riley’s younger sister Amelia, now 12, has urged all cyclists to wear helmets while riding their bikes, in order to help prevent the serious head injuries suffered by her brother.
“I just wish my big brother had a helmet on that night,” Amelia told her school assembly this week, as part of her campaign, which includes handing out helmets to classmates.
The 12-year-old, who said losing her brother at the age of nine was a traumatic experience, told the BBC that wearing a helmet while cycling should be mandatory by law, in a similar manner to using a car seatbelt.
“We want to make the people who don’t wear helmets look the stupid ones,” she said. “But people don’t wear helmets and you want them to just automatically put them on instead of people having to tell them to put them on.”
> Government shuts down mandatory cycling helmets question from Conservative MP
In December 2022, the Department for Transport insisted that the government has “no intention” to make wearing a helmet while cycling a legal requirement.
Addressing a written question from a fellow Conservative MP, the then-minister of state for the department, Jesse Norman, said the matter had been considered “at length” during the cycling and walking safety review in 2018.
Norman also added that while the Department for Transport “recommends that cyclists wear helmets”, the “safety benefits of mandating cycle helmets are likely to be outweighed by the fact that this would put some people off cycling”.
Responding to Amelia’s campaign for a helmet law, Steve Cole, the director of policy, campaigns, and public affairs at The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA), noted that other factors – such as infrastructure – are more critical to ensuring the safety of cyclists on the roads than helmets.
“While everyone has the right to choose whether they wear a helmet, the evidence shows us that they can more than halve the risk of a traumatic brain injury,” Cole said.
“However, it’s important to note that helmets alone do not prevent crashes from happening, and poor infrastructure can often be to blame for collisions.”
Cole also called on the government to “publish its long overdue road safety strategy and to invest in safe infrastructure”.
After obtaining a PhD, lecturing, and hosting a history podcast at Queen’s University Belfast, Ryan joined road.cc in December 2021 and since then has kept the site’s readers and listeners informed and enthralled (well at least occasionally) on news, the live blog, and the road.cc Podcast. After boarding a wrong bus at the world championships and ruining a good pair of jeans at the cyclocross, he now serves as road.cc’s senior news writer. Before his foray into cycling journalism, he wallowed in the equally pitiless world of academia, where he wrote a book about Victorian politics and droned on about cycling and bikes to classes of bored students (while taking every chance he could get to talk about cycling in print or on the radio). He can be found riding his bike very slowly around the narrow, scenic country lanes of Co. Down.
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130 comments
Try tapping your head with a heavy hammer with/without a helmet and see if you are still so convinced a helmet offers no protection.
You were looking for this:
https://cityofraleigh0drupal.blob.core.usgovcloudapi.net/drupal-prod/COR...
(I absolutely fucking can't believe this actually exists out there...)
I have some issues with that experiment. Firstly, the hammer is too small so is only demonstrating the range that cycle helmets are effective - it would be instructive to also do the same experiment and have a burly hammer wielder swing a big sledgehammer as hard as they can and see if the helmet is still protective. (I suspect that the helmet would make little difference unless it manages to deflect the sledgehammer).
The other issue is that having a static piece of wood doesn't capture the nature of moving collisions and certainly doesn't capture the nature of brain injuries with the brain "sloshing" against the inside of the skull due to the head suddenly stopping or changing direction. Maybe throwing raw eggs at a wall would be more accurate as you could examine whether the yolk is broken afterwards, though we'd need to find some really tiny helmets or use ostrich eggs.
Absolutely agree. I'm dumbfounded anyone actually thought up bullshit like that.
The definition of bad science, and utterly typical of the "evidence" used to promote helmets.
Try getting hit by 2 tonnes of metal moving at speed and tell me that half an inch of polystyrene (with holes cut in it) will make any real difference to the outcome.
It is staggering, in fact I find it truly DISGUSTING, that a child FUCKING DIES and the answer for so many wags is that a flimsy little hat would have stopped it happening.
It's a fucking insult to 15 year old Riley Ketley and every other dead cyclist. All the bullshitting "helmet saved my life" people and the "you're stupid if you don't wear one" fuckwits should hang their heads in shame. You are part of the problem.
By all means wear a helmet if you wish, that's 100% fine with me. I wear one sometimes. But the victim-blaming drivel that spews forth every single time this topic comes up is absolutely off the scale in its hypocrisy.
Done the hammer experiment yet? How did it work out for you?
Tried engaging with logic yet? If so, seems not to have worked out for you.
There was no "logic" in his post and no evidence of any understanding of physics or cycling--just a lot of swearing. Why would I want to "engage" with that?
"There was no "logic" in his post and no evidence"
It was there and in the many other posts in this and countless similar threads on the matter, if you can read. Yet you helmet zealots relentlessly come out with the same utter bollocks like your hammer "experiment", no one wonder one ends up swearing. It's the equivalent of the 50th close pass in a week.
Then kindly explain the logical argument above that shows a helmet cannot provide any protection, or whatever it is you are trying to demonstrate.
I don't believe that is marmotte27's stance and if so, you're making a strawman argument.
My stance is that cycle helmets provide meaningless protection in severe multi-vehicle collisions and it's not worth discussing them in that context, but instead we should focus on why the collision occurred and the steps to prevent similar incidents, whether that's separated infrastructure, road design or driver training/punishments.
Consider an experiment involving a finger, a hammer and a few mm of protective foam. A light tap with a hammer on your finger will likely hurt and with the protective foam, it'll hurt less. However a really hard smash with the hammer is going to do a lot of damage with or without the foam. Technically, the foam will have provided some protection, but likely too small to measure.
What you consider as logic isn’t it actually. Mark Treasure (see below) explains that very well, so I don’t have to repeat it here, probably a lot less clearly.
Helmet zealots are never about the actual security of cyclists. They’re about any or all of the following:
- deluding themselves that, wearing a helmet, they or people they care about are actually safe
- gaslighting others, even loved ones, into feeling safe because of a helmet
- deflecting responsibility and culpability for the dangers they pose as motorists to others
- avoiding efforts to change their own transport choices and behaviour on the roads
- avoiding efforts to see, think about and understand the real risks in our transport system and wider society
- avoiding efforts to see, think about and understand the vested interests at work to skew our perception of those real risks
- avoiding efforts to actually speak out about and do something about those real risks and the people who try to distract from them or hide them
I'm not what you think you mean by "what you consider as logic", since I haven't anywhere specified what I "consider as logic". Your entire comment is based on prejudice and assumption and has nothing to do with anything I have written. It is valueless.
"I'm not what you think you mean by "what you consider as logic", since I haven't anywhere specified what I "consider as logic""
"Try tapping your head with a heavy hammer with/without a helmet and see if you are still so convinced a helmet offers no protection."
* waves *
Go have the same collision that I had - without wearing a helmet - and we'll compare brain injuries.
I'll wait.
Why weren't you wearing full body armour, please? It could have protected you from some of your other life-changing injuries.
P.S.: I've already posted this on here before, but maybe this time someone will actually read it:
https://aseasyasridingabike.wordpress.com/2018/03/28/from-the-specific-t...
Thanks for posting, I read it! Excellent article, should be compulsory reading for anyone demanding a helmet law, along with the whole population studies from Australia.
The driver is saying he moved over to the right, to give the cyclists as much room as possible, but the victim still managed to get in front of him?
The crash was unavoidable?
Driver seems to have got away with it, but there is nothing unusual in that.
Cyclist decided to go straight across to a shop or the other side? There are occasions where it can be unavoidable - https://youtu.be/QCWJTvgS0mM?t=394
2 seconds earlier and could have been serious.
Best *always* to give more room to youngsters and expect erratic behaviour.
No point looking to PPE
Mark Hodson
"Helmets are so good motorcycle #KSI s are almost non existent...what do you mean don't be so sarcastic, it's because of x y & z ....so what you are saying is that we need to evidentially identify the reasons behind collisions & negate the danger at source...glad we got there ..."
In that clip you've linked to, shouldn't we all drive expecting something like that to happen every time we approach a junction? The driver looked to be going appropriately slowly so the chance of a collision was low. Plenty of other drivers 'in a rush', race up to blind junctions and would have hit those cyclists, and it would it have been declared 'unavoidable', with no charges for the driver.
It was the nearest I could find. The point was if the driver had arrived 2 seconds earlier they would have very likely hit him or him them.
I see your point that things may be 'unavoidable', and that clip is close. My point was our ridiculous tolerances for collisions to be declared 'accidents' and 'unavoidable'.
How exactly this particular collision happened isn't clear to me. My understanding is the cyclist pulled out abruptly and the driver drove into the back of him. I assume there isn't any dash cam footage, and there never will be, of someone driving and overtaking cautiously and a cyclist moving so abruptly that a driver goes into the back of them.
Yes, I was just trying to address the idea that things are always avoidable.
You only have to watch a few dashcam videos to see collisions are often avoidable by slowing or reading the road
As I said earlier, always give children room and expect erratic behaviour.
... and some things are more avoidable than others - like motorists being run over by pedestrians and cyclists, or cars being hit by trains where there is a fully grade separated crossing.
Some of these things have in fact occurred but those are usually appropriate for "freak accident" designation (maybe more investigation needed in the train case). There are good reasons they are incredibly rare - we've fixed it so the usual human fallibility and error is (almost) designed out.
Making things *far less likely* in the given case would be eg. examining this street - is it actually a street or a road? Are children to be expected travelling or playing here? Would it be appropriate to "tame the cars" by blocking this as a through route, putting in "traffic calming" and dropping the expected speed to 20mph or less?
Or if this has to remain a road make it safe for the children by giving them a completely separate cycle path.
Neither suggestion is 100% proof against crashes but shown to make them much less likely.
Of course that may be too "nanny state" and spoiling people (children?) by insulating them from the consequences of their own actions. I'd just point out that this is *exactly* what we have done for people in cars over the last century...
"Rule H2 - Rule for drivers, motorcyclists, horse drawn vehicles, horse riders and cyclists
At a junction you should give way to pedestrians crossing or waiting to cross a road into which or from which you are turning."
Not % applicable as kids on bikes but they are using the pavement. It seems you are right drivers should approach junctions prepsred to give way to pedestrians.
Whilst thoughts are always with the loved ones of those affected in these situations...
As we know, bicycle helmets will have almost no protective capacity in higher speed impacts.
I suspect that we will soon be required to wear actual Iron Man suits or a zorb ball to avoid drivers being required to do what they should: drive safely.
So presumably, given the rider was riding legally, the road has been closed until it can be redesigned to prevent unavoidable fatalities?
(/sarcasm)
This is exactly what should happen if we want to be serious about reducing traffic collisions - close the road/junction to large motor traffic until the incident is fully investigated. The result should always be either prosecution of the guilty party or a redesign to prevent future incidents.
I think this is law in the Netherlands
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