On July 31, a cyclist rammed 60-year-old Michal Collopy in the bike lane on 23rd Street and Sixth Avenue and kept on pedaling. Collopy died a week later from severe brain trauma; the killer remains at large.

The lesson is clear: Dedicated bike lanes may offer some protection to cyclists, but by eliminating the threat of traffic for long stretches between intersections, they also foster inattention and unsafe bicycle speeds.

So it’s hard to blame residents of Manhattan’s Upper West Side for filing suit last month to prevent the construction of a bike lane along Central Park West. These residents are David facing the Goliath of the bike lobby.

In recent years, cyclists have killed two people in the park. A 31-year-old cyclist fatally knocked to the ground Jill Tarlov, a mother of two. And 75-year-old Irving Schachter lost his life to a teenager who presumably lacked the experience and training required to safely circumvent a lumbering pedicab.

Old folks are but wrinkly, silver-haired pylons on the imaginary racetrack of the park’s handle-barbarians, and woe betide the senior citizen whose leisurely saunter stands in the way of the cyclist’s personal record.

The Upper West Siders’ fears, then, are well-founded. But predictably, bicycle-advocacy groups dispatched a couple dozen low-BMI activists to the plaintiffs building to shout platitudes at ­bewildered residents.

If the addition of bike lanes was beneficial to a majority of New Yorkers, they might have a point. As it is, there is zero evidence that bike infrastructure benefits anyone but cyclists, which means that pedestrians are endangered, traffic snarled and entire communities imposed upon to clear a path for the less than 1% of city residents who ride regularly — weather permitting, that is.

To be sure, the city has a responsibility to make cyclists as safe as possible. But it simply isn’t possible to make them entirely safe. Like it or not, street space is finite, intersections exist and motor vehicles aren’t disappearing anytime soon. Biking in the city will always be a dangerous gamble.

Which is why the city’s responses to recent deaths are utterly irresponsible. When announcing the mayor’s new plan, Department of Transportation Commissioner Polly Trottenberg declared: “We have assembled a long and aggressive to-do list that we think that can change this year’s tragic increase in cyclist fatalities — and encourage even more New Yorkers to get on bicycles.”

Put another way, every death caused by cyclist irresponsibility is reason to grant a new concession — to the bike lobby. No wonder the DOT won this year’s “Bike-to-Work Challenge” from Transportation Alternatives, the main cycling lobby.

The city elite’s ideological kinship with the bike lobby may also explain the City Council’s and DOT’s refusal to address — or even mention — cyclists’ lawless behavior. It’s why the various proposals intended to increase cyclist safety never include, well, safe cycling.

One-third of this year’s bicycle fatalities were precipitated by cyclists ignoring traffic lights, according to The New York Times. Yet city leaders don’t call for increased adherence to laws, mandatory training or even helmets.

Opposition to these basic precautions emanates directly from advocacy groups that unapologetically defend reckless riding. When challenged on cyclists’ lousy behavior in a recent interview, Marco Conner, co-executive director of Transportation Alternatives, piously argued that “the responsibility you have wielding a multi-ton car or truck is very different from” cycling.

There’s not a single seasoned cyclist from Seattle to Singapore who would deny that education, law abidance and headgear makes bicycling safer, but TA lobbies for exemption from traffic lights and objects to helmet laws.

As it happens, helmets are mandatory for street riding in both Seattle and Singapore. Yet Jon Orcutt, a former DOT policy director and current communications director for Bike New York, another bike lobby, opposed helmet requirements even for inexperienced bike share users, telling the Times in 2011: “You don’t want to impose a regulation. You don’t want to be working at cross-purposes with a heavy-handed rule that depresses or reduces cycling.” Helmets are hell on man-buns, you see.

Death isn’t an appropriate penalty for breaking a few rules, but it can be the unfortunate consequence, and by promoting cycling without mandating the most basic precautions, the city has demonstrated egregious negligence. Meanwhile, here’s hoping David can best the Lycra-clad Goliath at the state Supreme Court.

Gary Taustine is a writer in New York City.