Mayor Bill de Blasio is considering a controversial idea to tackle the controversial issue of bare breasts in Times Square—opening up the area’s pedestrian plaza to car traffic again.

The mayor—who has launched a task force headed by Police Commissioner Bill Bratton and City Planning Commissioner Carl Weisbrod to determine how to ban body-paint-wearing ladies and costume characters from soliciting cash—said he was open to ending pedestrian plazas in the busy district. It’s an idea floated by Mr. Bratton, who believes it could make it more difficult for the “entertainers” to ply their trades.

“Commissioner Bratton and I have talked about that option. That will be considered by the task force,” Mr. de Blasio said during an unrelated press conference in the Rockaways. “Now, that’s a big endeavor and like every option, the option comes with pros and cons. So we’re going to argue about what those pros and cons would be.”

The pedestrian plaza was created under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and Mr. Bloomberg—who wasn’t sure about the idea when it was first pitched to him—credited it with reducing pollution, making streets safer for pedestrians, and for encouraging more commerce, according to an ironically titled WNYC article about how the plazas were there to stay when Mr. Bloomberg departed in 2013.

The woman—sometimes dubbed desnudas in Spanish—have come into the political spotlight after the Daily News has put the painted ladies on the cover of its newspaper several days in a row. But it’s unclear whether the idea of turning pedestrian plazas back into streets as a solution will have much support from other politicians.

“The City Council is considering its legislative options but the Speaker believes in and supports keeping pedestrian plazas,” Eric Koch, a spokesman for Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito said.

Comptroller Scott Stringer, who backed the plazas as Manhattan borough president, said shutting them would be a “serious overreaction.”

“The introduction of the pedestrian plazas has been a positive change to the urban landscape, giving Times Square much-needed open space and improving pedestrian safety,” Mr. Stringer said in a statement. “To shut it down would be a serious overreaction to what is essentially a quality of life enforcement issue.”

Councilman Dan Garodnick, who represents half of Times Square, struck a similar tone.