I was nine years old when I rolled my bike straight through a stop sign at a main intersection. Luckily, my oversight didn’t end in a terrible accident, just a friendly-but-firm reprimand by a police officer and a reminder that if there’s a sign that says “Stop”, you stop.

The reason why I learned that important lesson without as much as a scrape and from a very calm police officer was that it all happened within the safety of a mock course. That was part of the deal in Germany. Police officers came to our school and taught us how to cycle safely on a closed-off track complete with mini traffic lights and road signs until we knew them properly. It was a standard part of the Fahrradprüfung, a formal bicycle skills test that more than 95% of German kids sit in third or fourth grade.

When you’re preparing for Fahrradprüfung, you learn the road rules in class. You learn how to signal, check your blind spot, and read a give-way sign properly (unlike me, apparently). Then real police officers in uniform run you through a practical test on a mock road course. Pass, and you get a certificate and, more importantly, the confidence to ride to school on your own.

I think about that test whenever I read the comments under an Australian news story about cyclists.

55% of Australian drivers don’t see cyclists as fully human

It’s probably fair to say that Australian drivers and cyclists don’t exactly get along nicely. Queensland research found 76 per cent of male cyclists and 72 per cent of female cyclists had been harassed on the road in the past year, including close passes, shouted abuse, and obscene gestures. A Monash University study asked drivers to rate cyclists on a scale from ape to human. A shocking 55 per cent of non-cyclists rated cyclists as not completely human. Among the drivers who scored highest on that scale, one in five admitted to deliberately blocking a cyclist with their car.

Meanwhile, cyclist deaths in Australia rose 32.4 per cent in 2025, and - despite all the headlines about teenagers behaving badly on ebikes - fewer kids are getting on bikes at all. Weekly cycling participation dropped to 15 per cent in 2023 and has stayed at this level since.

This reads more like a legitimacy problem than a typical road safety problem, and, as it turns out, there’s research to back this assumption.

Riding a bike changes how you see other cyclists

A 2019 Swinburne University study asked what factors predict driver anger toward cyclists. The strongest factor wasn't close calls or bad experiences. It was whether the driver saw cyclists as a legitimate road user at all. Perhaps not surprisingly, drivers who cycle themselves showed significantly less anger toward cyclists. Riding a bike changes how you see people on bikes.

That's the case for the Fahrradprüfung: It makes future drivers who already know what it feels like to be one.

Now, there are some limits to this argument. No study has followed German kids from their bike test into adulthood and measured whether they drive more safely around cyclists twenty years later. That specific chain, childhood cycling producing safer adult drivers, hasn't been tested. Cycling UK, the peak cycling advocacy body in the UK, has called the evidence for it anecdotal and asked for someone to study it.

What we do have is research on adults who currently cycle and drive. One Australian study found these "dual users" were one and a half times more likely to report safe driving behaviour around cyclists than drivers who don't ride. But that might just mean that people who are already more considerate might simply be more likely to cycle in the first place. Correlation doesn’t equal causation.

There's also a study that complicates the picture a bit. Researchers using eye-tracking equipment found a driver's own cycling experience made no measurable difference to how much visual attention they paid to cyclists on the road. If there's a mechanism connecting cycling experience to safer driving, it isn't as simple as "spend more time looking at cyclists."

Yet, despite these gaps in the research, the German model has aspects worth copying.

Cycling as a rite of passage

There are some great cycling education programs available in ANZ, but they don’t quite provide the same framework as the German model. Bicycle Network's Ride2School program reaches thousands of schools and pulls in hundreds of thousands of kids on its national day each year. New Zealand runs BikeReady, a structured national curriculum.

The key difference is that Ride2School is opt-in, school by school, mostly about encouragement rather than a formal skills and road law test. There's no police officer with a clipboard. There's no shared national expectation that every kid sits a test before they're allowed to ride to school alone. It's a behaviour nudge, not a rite of passage.

The difference is important to point out because a rite of passage is what normalises something culturally. Every German adult driving today either passed that test or watched their own kids do it. Cycling never needed defending as a "real" way to get around, because everyone did it before they could drive.

Compare that to a country where a driver's licence is often the first and only road credential someone ever earns, where cyclists barely rate a mention in the graduated licensing materials young Australian drivers study before their test. A recent ACT study found exactly that gap. It's prompted the territory to add vulnerable road user content to its licensing system. It’s a small and sensible fix that also points out an important gap: we're teaching a generation of drivers the road rules without ever teaching them what it's like to be on the other side of the windscreen.

Why we need education AND infrastructure

This is not to say that we should replace safe cycling infrastructure with education. We arguably need both. Denmark and the Netherlands run cycling education comparable to Germany's, but their safety records also lean on protected bike lanes, traffic calming around schools, and enforcement of close-pass laws. Education without safe roads to practise on is not going to convince any parent to let their kids ride to school, and a test in third grade doesn't fix a road without a bike lane or shoulder.

So, I’m not saying that Australia should copy Germany exactly, but look at a number of factors together to make our roads safer for cyclists:

• Put cyclist awareness into graduated driver licensing nationally
• Fund a structured school cycling program, closer to BikeReady than Ride2School, with a skills and road rules assessment kids look forward to passing
• Pair it with infrastructure that makes those skills usable: protected lanes, safe routes to school, enforced close-pass distances
• Commission the longitudinal research nobody has run yet, so in ten years we're arguing from evidence instead of memory

I don't know if the kid who gets into trouble with a police officer for ignoring a stop sign grows up to be a more careful driver. But I do know what it felt like to grow up somewhere where cycling wasn't a lifestyle choice or a political statement. It was just how you got to school.