Collie Police are calling on the community to make sure school children stay safe while riding bikes and scooters around town.
Senior Sergeant Heath Soutar said police had received numerous reports of cars narrowly avoiding collisions with children riding their bikes and scooters to and from school.
“I want people driving cars to be vigilant, especially around schools ... but people riding bikes and scooters also have to know that they need to be vigilant and obey the road rules,” he said.
“Although we haven’t had a serious incident, I tend to think it’s only a matter of time before someone is knocked off a bike or scooter. I certainly don’t want that to happen but it nearly has before and I’d say it could happen in the future.”
Senior Sergeant Soutar said police would be focussing on bicycle safety in the coming months, particularly making sure everyone is wearing a helmet.
“The majority of kids on bikes wear helmets, but there is certainly a smaller element that don’t and we’re going to be targetting those youths.”
Senior Sergeant Soutar said anyone, including adults, found riding a bike without a helmet would incur a $50 fine.
He also said parents should consider encouraging their kids to wear helmets while riding scooters, despite there being no law to do so.
“There are a lot of our youths that ride scooters and they tend to like going fast and darting in and out of traffic,” he said.
“Although there are no provisions to wear helmets or safety equipment, I would ask parents to try and enforce that. It’s only a matter of time before one of our young folk riding a scooter makes a mistake, and we don’t want that.”
Collie Senior High School principal Dale Miller said bike and scooter safety was an issue around the school.
“Road safety in the Collie community is really important – and that’s from parents who drive past the school and students on their bikes and scooters,” she said.
“Students get a lot of education on road safety from wearing a bike helmet to simple things like looking left and right.
“We have a lot of support from parents around the school … we just now need to get students to take responsibility for some of their behaviour because they’re at that age where risk-taking is high and they will just pull-out in front of a car.”
Ms Miller said it was important that the school and parents worked together to make sure students were safe.
Some of the standard requirements for a bike to be considered roadworthy include a bell, a rear brake, a red rear reflector and yellow reflectors on the sides of both tyres and pedals and front and rear lights if you’re riding in the dark.
In order to make sure cyclists are safe around Collie, the shire, Collie Police and South32 will host a bike safety day on Sunday, with free bike safety checks from Crank’n Cycles available.
