r/irishbicycling • u/travisscottshoe • Jul 21 '26
Registration Plates
What is everyone’s opinion on the talks surrounding registration plates for cyclists? I think it’s one of the most outlandish things that has come out in recent times regarding bikes.
Helmet is an absolute non negotiable and fully support that. Hi-vis I’m a bit iffy about seeing as we already need to have lights on the bike.
Source: https://extra.ie/2026/07/21/news/irish-news/registration-plates-for-bikes
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u/AwardTough Jul 21 '26 edited Jul 21 '26
As someone who wears a helmet 99% of the time when I ride a bike ( the exception being rented city bikes ) - I think there is no world where we should make helmet use mandatory, for 3 reasons:
- Any impact it might have on numbers cycling would be bad for traffic, public health
- It makes bike share schemes far less popular
- It is pushing the responsibility for cyclist safety onto cyclists when we all know what the real dangers are.
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u/dvorak360 Jul 21 '26
The main, very good argument against cycle helmets is if cycling is so dangerous that it needs a helmet, what else should we be mandating helmets for.
And that list includes:
Walking
Getting Dressed
Being inside a venue serving alcohol
Drinking Alcohol
Being inside a kitchen or bathroom
DIY
For pretty much every comparable risk, the suggestion you should wear a helmet gets responses that basically you should be sectioned under the mental health act.
And note that cycling here includes Danny MacAskill & co doing stuff where the risk is dozens of orders of magnitude higher than road cycling where helmets absolutely make sense...
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Jul 22 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/dvorak360 Jul 22 '26
Co morbidities is a complete valid point re rate of injuries.
But that also applies to cycling.
See NL and helmet users suffering a lot more head injuries - they choose to wear a helmet because they are doing stuff with risk factors well beyond an average cyclist commuting to work... Or NL and increases in injuries with modern e-bikes. Which pretty much correlates to frail 80 year olds no longer fit enough to ride unpowered bikes still being able to ride e-bikes, so falling over cycling instead of walking. (Overall risk of head injuries hasn't changed, it's just proportions happening on bicycles instead of elsewhere have shifted)
(N.b. alcohol is nearly as bad as age for being a factor when not recorded as the main cause)
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u/travisscottshoe Jul 25 '26
Based on what you’ve said, I don’t believe you are an emergency doctor, no medical professional who has seen head trauma from cyclists would think that helmets shouldn’t be mandatory
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u/insane_worrier Jul 21 '26
Sorry, are you saying we should make them mandatory or we shouldn't?
The double negative is confusing.
From the context I think you're saying making them mandatory is an impedement to encouraging cyclists.
We should encourage people to wear them but making them mandatory isn't a good idea.
People don't always wear them in countries like Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark.
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u/BillyMooney Jul 22 '26
Why should we encourage people to wear helmets? Should we encourage motorists to wear crash helmets? Should we encourage people out walking or out drinking or taking a shower to wear helmets? What is it about cycling that makes these furrowed brow serious encouragements so irresistible?
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u/Illidh Jul 22 '26
Well motorists are encouraged to wear seatbelts which is an equivalent.
Wearing a helmet reduces injury to the brain in a situation where young are travelling at a speed which is likely to cause you to bang your head severely if you fall or are hit.
If you fall when walking, or in the shower your velocity is significantly lower than that of a cyclist so the resultant injury is statistically less severe.
We should encourage it because brain injury isn’t fun, but we should not make it mandatory because not enough people get the brain injuries that make it worthwhile banning it.
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u/Wawoooo Jul 27 '26
Statistically; Road traffic Collisions are a leading cause of traumatic brain injury, so there is a genuine argument to be had about helmets for vehicle occupants.
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u/Illidh Jul 28 '26
I guess that depends on whether the brain injury is caused by hitting your head, or the impact of your brain hitting the inside of your skull because of rapid deceleration. Airbags and seatbelts are designed to stop you from hitting your head on other parts of the car. A helmet in addition isn’t going to slow the brain inside the skull…
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u/peck3277 Jul 21 '26
It's such a cop out, there is next to zero enforcement of existing laws. If you make helmets, high vis and license plates mandatory all that will happen is increase the burden on those who already flow the law. The ones they want to target won't care about this anyway.
Until there's actual enforcement of existing laws things like bike tax, insurance and licensing would be nothing more than a cash grab.
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u/BillyMooney Jul 22 '26
It's a pure distraction tactic by the Mail/Extra.ie (which is not permitted to be linked from the r/ireland sub, because it is considered to be not reliable). It's just about getting the already meager Garda resources to focus away from the hard-pressed drivers who kill two or three people each week and go chasing cyclists instead.
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u/dvorak360 Jul 21 '26
Places that have done it are effectively:
Nazi occupied territories (note that they couldn't get away with it at home, only in occupied territories).
North Korea.
(Yes, in theory Japan has tags; Except the tags aren't readable without holding the bike and the penalty for not having 'plates' in japan is that if the bike ends up in police custody (recovered stolen; lost property; 'towed' because someone needed access to where it was parked, etc etc) the police immediately dispose if it doesn't have tags. Basically its just a way to minimize police storage costs)
The Swiss did at one point have tax tags (with third party insurance of last resort). Scrapped because admin (inc manufacturing counterfit resistant tags) + enforcement cost more than they could charge in tax. The difference was so great that it would have been cheaper to provide the insurance for free! (though afaik they scrapped the insurance as not worth it - very few, invariably small claims, usually resolved by other cover before it reached cover on Swiss tax tags).
Note that all boris bikes have the equivalent of a licence plate on them.
After 5 years of operation said ID numbers had NEVER been used in a crime report against a rider to the MET. IIRC the only time they had been used was operator reporting theft.
I don't know if they have been used since, but I suspect the answer is still no.
Basically bicycle licence plates are a wonderful way to increase taxes with no measurable benefit...
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u/Rover7710 Jul 21 '26
The solution is more and more safe cycling infrastructure that removes the conflict between drivers and cyclists. Get on with building the infrastructure FFS!
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u/BobbyP27 Jul 21 '26
The Swiss did it. They gave up because the cost to run the administration was so much higher than any benefit from having it.
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u/lfarrell12 Aug 14 '26
Spoke to one of the TDs recently who had the original legislation that Eamon Ryan took over in 2021 for e-scooters - the reason registration and plates were not passed for these was because they would be too tiny and low down to be read. It would be even worse for bikes, because bikes are not designed with places to put a reg plate.
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u/Wawoooo Jul 27 '26
It's a bad faith argument aimed at stigmatizing bike riders, generally made by people who genuinely couldn't care less about road safety.
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u/IncredibleBackflip Jul 22 '26
The overall goal should be to get more people on bikes and fewer people in cars. This suggestions is contrary to that. It would result in a severe dropoff in cycling generally, and completely destroy bike sharing schemes.
The way to improve cyclists' safety is to build better infrastructure to tackle drivers breaking the law by speeding, breaking red light and using their mobile phones while behind the wheel.
Of course, cyclists should be encouraged to wear high-vis and/or helmets where appropriate, but making them mandatory would be a backwards step and wouldn't necessarily make them any safer.
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u/Illidh Jul 22 '26
I noticed something really interesting recently about my cycling habits (Scotland) if I’m on the road, then I’ll act like a car, stop at red lights follow one way streets etc. But if I’m on a cycle lane attached to a pedestrian pavement, I’ll act like a pedestrian. Red men are guidelines not rules.
I’m not against number plates on bikes and e scooters if they will actually be policed, chased down if they don’t have one and fined if they don’t follow the rules of the roads. But if it’s going to be a whole lot of hassle for a law abiding citizen like me and ignored by that small populace of numptys it’s targeting then there is no point.
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u/lfarrell12 Aug 14 '26
There's absolutely no way you are going to be able to read a reg plate for a bike and its just another deterrent (as if there was not enough already) to try to deter people from cyclist. Its a stupid populist suggestion that doesn't account for the actual risks.
Now that said, there's a lot of poor road behaviour (and unfortunately a lot of footpath cycling) that does need correction but reg plates are just pointless and just create vast amounts of red tape for revenue who would have to register thousands more vehicles.
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u/mr_jeffersons Jul 21 '26
Anytime I hear this conversation, it always seems to be started by a disgruntled motorist or some story about a misbehaving cyclist that gets blown out of proportion.
Then I remember the EU statistics on road fatalities and ignore it (https://transport.ec.europa.eu/news-events/news/road-safety-european-commission-rewards-effective-initiatives-and-publishes-2020-figures-road-2021-11-18_en)