With the advent “of Mayor Bloomberg’s disastrous vision of turning the city into some idyllic paradise for bikers,” Gerald Rosenthal of the Upper East Side wrote, “walkers have become a threatened species!’’

Few cyclists would agree with this impression of utopia. Since mid July, three more cyclists have died in crashes with cars or trucks, bringing the number of cyclist deaths this year to 18. In the most recent instance, a 30-year old artist was killed traveling northbound on Third Avenue in Brooklyn when she attempted to maneuver around the open door of a parked van and collided with a Freightliner tractor-trailer according to the police.

Mayor Bill de Blasio quickly reminded the city, via Twitter, that it is against the law to open a car door in the path of a cyclist. But the legal consequence to the driver for opening that door does not extend beyond a summons. Of the 18 fatalities this year, arrests have been made in two cases (though in six or so instances cyclists either disobeyed or failed to pay attention to traffic signals). Even when a cyclist was killed by a driver who was exceeding the speed limit by 12 miles an hour in Brooklyn in May, the driver was merely given a summons .

However much cyclists might need to heighten their awareness on the roads, cars and trucks kill people in far greater volume than cyclists kill people. Of the 711 pedestrians who have died in traffic collusions since 2014, only four have been killed by bicycles.

The law, however, protects some forms of human error more assiduously than others. In the same week that a driver was punished with a summons for opening a car door in such a way that it led to a young woman’s death, Juan Rodriguez, a social worker and the father of 1-year old twins, was charged with manslaughter for accidentally closing the door to his car, leaving his children in the back seat, where they died from the excessive heat. He believed that he had dropped them off at day care, in a scenario that has become tragically common among distracted parents since the late 1990s.