On a May day in 1884, Samuel Clemens — better known as Mark Twain — took a break from writing in his Hartford home to do something that, at 48 years old, he had never done before: ride a bicycle.

Twain wrote about mounting the four-foot-tall penny-farthing bike for the first time — and of subsequently flying over the handlebars and landing in the hospital — in “Taming the Bicycle,” an essay published seven years after his death in 1910. Despite the difficulties Twain faced on his inaugural ride, the author ended the piece by encouraging readers to buy a two-wheeler for themselves.

“You will not regret it, if you live,” he wrote.

In New York City , where a cycling boom was underway, several thousand riders pedaled through the city’s streets, according to Evan Friss, author of “On Bicycles: A 200-Year History of Cycling in New York City.” But the undercurrent of uncertainty in Twain’s command — about whether mounting a bike meant risking one’s life — was increasingly a concern in New York: in 1880, officials voted to ban bicycles and tricycles from the city’s parks in a bid to protect pedestrians from what parks commissioners said were the threats posed by pedalers.

The belief that cyclists endanger other New Yorkers persists among some, but bikers are overwhelmingly victims of collisions rather than the perpetrators of them: only one cyclist has killed a pedestrian since 2017, according to Gothamist , and 10 cyclists have died on New York City streets so far this year — double the amount killed by this time last year, according to a Police Department spokeswoman, Sgt. Jessica McRorie. (Sergeant McRorie couldn't immediately say how many cyclists had killed pedestrians in recent years.)