My second gripe has to do with your specious claim that in 2013 “741 cyclists were killed and among them, 63 percent were not wearing helmets. There is a proven link between the wearing of helmets and the chance of coming out of a collision with a less severe injury.” The data tell us nothing about how many among the 63% would have been killed wether or not they were wearing a helmet. Helmet safety standards are based on tests of impacts that happen when a head moving at roughly 20mph collides with a stationary object. Data on the context in which bicyclist-car collisions resulting in death occur show that 40% of the time the cyclist is killed when rear-ended by a car. Additionally, the League of American Bicyclists report on bicyclist fatalities finds that “high-speed urban and suburban arterial streets with no provisions for bicyclists are an over-represented location–representing 56% of all bicyclist fatalities.”

If you are genuinely interested in the potential for bicycling to address unmet transportation needs of low-income communities and to reduce our society’s contributions to global warming, then you need to be creative in thinking about who currently bicycles and what the barriers are to inspiring more people to ride. You may be right that a helmet law will not deter avid cyclists. But the biggest barrier to getting more people on bikes is perceived safety. A mandatory helmet law sends two messages to the public: (1) Bicycling is an unsafe activity; and, more implicitly, (2) the automobile is our transportation priority so don’t count on safety conditions improving for bicyclists. In other words, let’s think about how we can adapt our transportation infrastructure so that fewer collisions between cars and bicyclists occur. One thing is certain: Whether or not bicyclists are wearing helmets, we are safer when one our built environment is designed to ensure that car’s are aware of our presence and infrastructure exists to give us a buffer from fast moving vehicles.

Lastly, I think you mean “pedaling” and not “peddling.”