The Bloomberg administration has shifted gears on whether to require helmets for all bicycle riders — supporting the idea one year and rejecting it the next, The Post has learned.
“If helmets can prevent many, or even some, bicycle fatalities and injuries that occur, why would we not take the next step and mandate them for all users?” former Transportation Commissioner Iris Weinshall said at a 2007 City Council hearing.
Weinshall was testifying at a hearing on a proposal to require helmets for bike-riding messengers and food deliverers. But she said the administration was working on a bill to force all riders to wear helmets.
State law requires only that children under 14 wear helmets.
Two months after her appearance before the council, Weinshall left for a job at City University. “The new commissioner [Janette Sadik-Khan] had a different view,” said one insider.
So when Councilman David Greenfield (D-Brooklyn) recently introduced a bill that would pick up where Weinshall left off, Mayor Bloomberg quickly rejected it as unnecessary.
“If that mandate would not increase safety, why did this very same administration support it?” Greenfield asked yesterday. “It seems hypocritical and anti-safety.”
Seth Solomonow, a Transportation Department spokesman, said officials there had decided on “an approach more consistent with global practices on increasing bike ridership and safety. Some of the few cities that have had helmet laws have since repealed them — including Mexico City and Tel Aviv.”
Bicycle advocates generally oppose helmet laws for adults, arguing that safety is increased where there are more bike riders around and motorists get used to them.
But a mandatory helmet law would pose a big problem for the city’s bike-sharing program, which is launching next month without helmets.
David Mozer of the International Bicycle Fund, a bike advocacy group in Seattle, said mandatory helmets are “problematic” for those trying to develop a similar sharing program in his city.