Over the weekend, a 47-year-old cyclist was killed in Bushwick after a driver in an SUV chased and intentionally hit him. The driver, IDed as 41-year-old Korey Johnson, says he believed the cyclist was breaking into his car; he has since been charged with murder and manslaughter. That crash marked the 20th cyclist killed by cars in New York City this year, which is double the number of people killed in 2018.

But this week, during a press conference on crime statistics, Mayor Bill de Blasio told reporters that his administration has internally discussed more regulations for cyclists—namely, requiring Citi Bike riders to wear helmets, and perhaps even compelling bike riders to register for licenses.

“I’m someone who believes that more and more people riding bikes has been a good thing for this city,” de Blasio said during the presser. “But we have to make sense of the safety realities.”

But putting more regulations on cyclists would have the opposite effect. By creating even more barriers to entry for New Yorkers who are bike-curious, or those who are casual riders, the city would, in fact, make cycling even more dangerous.

“Requiring adults to use bicycle helmets has been shown time and again to discourage people from biking,” Marco Conner, the deputy director of Transportation Alternatives, said in a statement. “When there are fewer people biking on city streets, we see higher rates of bicyclist crashes and injuries, in part because car and truck drivers become less accustomed to operating around bicyclists. The safest cities for biking and walking in the world do not mandate bike helmets or licenses.”

On the helmet issue, de Blasio said that “[t]here are different viewpoints on what would work and how much impact it would have,” referring to a mandatory helmet law, and that it’s “a real valid issue so it’s something we’re studying right now.”

But data does not back up his assertion that those “different viewpoints” are worth entertaining. Studies have shown that cycling in cities becomes safer when more riders are on the roads—and bike-sharing programs like Citi Bike have contributed to that uptick, with thousands of new riders taking to the streets since the program launched in 2013. According to data from the city’s Department of Transportation, there were close to 179 million cycling trips taken by New Yorkers in 2017, with about 17 million of those coming from Citi Bikers.

At the same time, mandatory helmet laws often leads to fewer bike-sharing trips. Mandatory helmet laws have been cited as one of several reasons for the demise of Seattle’s Pronto Bicycle Share program, which launched in 2014 and shut down in 2017. A similar problem plagues the bike-sharing program in Melbourne, Australia; more than half of respondents to a 2014 survey cited the city’s mandatory helmet law as a barrier to using the system.

Terrible idea. Helmet laws have contributed to the demise of bike share systems across the globe. Any city serious about bicycling safety--not to mention growing cycling as a form of transport--would never entertain a helmet law, which decreases the "safety in number" effect. https://t.co/u9Un1HEw12 — Doug Gordon (@BrooklynSpoke) September 4, 2019

It’s also worth noting that Citi Bike is, on the whole, a safe system, despite the lack of any sort of helmet requirement. The program launched in 2013, and to date, there have only been two fatalities—one of which happened earlier this year, when 74-year-old Victor Ang was hit by a UPS truck near Hudson Yards.

And in an otherwise safe system, helmets don’t actually offer as much protection as you might assume, according to a 2012 report published by the National Association of City Transportation Officials. That report, authored by Australian professor Piet de Jong, found that, “[i]n jurisdictions where cycling is safe, a helmet law is likely to have a large unintended negative health impact. In jurisdiction where cycling is relatively unsafe, helmets will do little to make it safer.”

Plus, helmets don’t always protect riders who are hit by cars or otherwise involved in accidents. Bike messenger Robyn Hightman died after being hit by a truck driver on 23rd Street in Manhattan—and they were wearing a helmet.

Does this mean you shouldn’t wear a helmet? Of course not; taking that extra precaution is a good idea. But should it be mandatory for cyclists, particularly those who might be picking up a Citi Bike on a whim or for a ride of just a few blocks? Not unless the city wants the bike share program to lose the ridership gains it’s made in the past six years.

The same logic goes for compelling cyclists to have licenses, an idea that has been proposed before—and has, unsurprisingly, proven to be quite unpopular. (And in cities where it has successfully been implemented, the fees are either very low—and put back into cycling systems—or the programs are rife for abuse.)

Such regulations have been proposed at both the city and state level in the past, and failed to garner support. It’s unclear how such a policy would be enforced, or what it would cost, or how it would impact a bike-sharing system like Citi Bike. And as Gothamist points out, requiring licenses to ride a bike would most likely unfairly impact immigrant and minority New Yorkers, who are already among those most at risk for being aggressively targeted for minor infractions.

So what is the solution to making our city’s streets safer? Investing in cycling infrastructure, such as bike lanes that are separated from vehicular traffic by some kind of physical barrier (rather than painted stripes), would go a long way. The de Blasio administration recently put forth its own cycling safety plan, called the Green Wave, that calls for installing 30 new miles of protected bike lanes every year—with the goal of creating a full network by 2030—along with cracking down on drivers who block bike lanes and truck drivers who flout traffic rules, and implementing signal timing to make cycling more efficient.

But reducing the number of cars on streets is also important, both in terms of making streets safer for bikers and pedestrians, and encouraging more people to ride. In its recently released Mobility Report, the DOT concluded that New York City’s streets are “more congested than ever,” with the number of for-hire vehicle trips increasing dramatically, and an uptick in freight traffic and home deliveries. And many cyclists are riding in lanes that offer, as Streetsblog put it, “green paint and a prayer”—so it’s no surprise that crashes are on the rise. The city is putting measures into place that may combat these problems; congestion pricing, which will be implemented in Manhattan below 60th Street, is the biggie, but a “cruising cap” on for-hire vehicles is also expected to help.

And as Aaron Gordon recently wrote at Jalopnik, the city should refocus its priorities when it comes to cycling; instead of using safety as the key metric—as Vision Zero currently does—it should be focusing on ridership, and ensuring that New York is a pleasant place for cyclists to ride.

“When it comes to cycling, ridership and safety are closely intertwined. Most people won’t bike if they don’t feel safe, but the more people who bike, the safer bikers are,” Gordon wrote. “The close relationship between the two can lead to a false impression that a policy focused on safety will increase ridership, but in fact it’s the other way around. By explicitly targeting ridership as the key metric, it forces policymakers to constantly ask: what makes people ride, and what makes people stop riding?”

Mandating helmets and implementing bike licensing would discourage people from riding, which would ultimately make our city less safe. Instead, de Blasio should listen to the many advocates who’ve implored him to accelerate the implementation of protected bike lanes, adopt internationally recognized safe streets design protocols, and find ways to shift the focus away from cars, and onto the millions of New Yorkers who get around in other ways.