Copyright smh
I started noticing them a few months ago and now, it seems, they’re everywhere. Groups of young men careening along roads chock-a-block with cars. Single cyclists merrily riding up the wrong side of the footpath, then swinging back onto the road, seemingly without a care in the world. All without helmets. They may as well be whooping and hollering, that’s how much fun they’re having. I get it. Wind in your hair feels good. But wow, how did we get to this? More than three decades after bike helmets became mandatory in Australia – leading the world, I might add – a whole new generation seems to have missed the message. You know, the one about how getting hit by a car without a helmet is a death sentence. How your skull just isn’t enough protection to save your life when it hits, at pace, hard things like bitumen, windscreens, bumpers. A moving tyre. I’m honestly perplexed. Are the e-bike companies not providing enough helmets for those who pick them up in one place and drop them off in another? Are the helmets getting broken, or lost, and not replaced in a timely manner? Are the police not being as vigilant with e-bike riders as they were with regular cyclists back when they were changing our behaviour en masse? Or is it a bit like smoking – reckless, bad-for-your-health stuff we thought we’d dealt with that’s somehow, inexplicably, become cool again. I see regular bike riders doing it, too, albeit not nearly as often. I know, I sound like a Karen. I’m of the right generation and my name does start with a K, so I’m already Karen-adjacent, I guess. But as writer Claire Heaney argued recently, there are Good Karens and Bad Karens. Or maybe, Good Karen Behaviour and Bad Karen Behaviour. And I’d argue this is Good Karen Behaviour, caring that our kids and young adults, you know, live. (Bad Karen Behaviour would be picking up the e-bike dumped outside your house and dumping it outside someone else’s house, as one of my neighbours – a male Karen – is fond of doing.)
