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A group of Maryland legislators don’t want to merely encourage cyclists to use helmets—they want to require it.

A bill introduced in the Maryland General Assembly late last week would make it mandatory for all cyclists to wear helmets; currently, only Maryland residents under the age of 16 (and those under the age of 18 in Montgomery County) have to wear a helmet while riding. The bill does offer a few exceptions: moped riders or passengers won’t have to wear helmets, nor will people riding bikes on Ocean City’s boardwalk. A similar effort was attempted in 2009, though it didn’t go anywhere.

Proponents of mandatory helmet laws argue that helmets help save lives. Opponents, like the Washington Area Bicyclist Association, say that while using helmets is smart, requiring it tends to discourage people from riding bikes to begin with. The fewer people that ride bikes, they say, the more dangerous it is for the cyclists that are left out on the road.

No local jurisdiction requires cyclists to wear helmets. It doesn’t seem to be much of a problem, especially among those who ride their bikes often: a recent D.C. Department of Transportation survey, for one, found that 75 percent of cyclists in the city wear helmets.

Users of Capital Bikeshare, on the other hand, overwhelmingly tend not to wear helmets; accident rates on Bikeshare are extremely low, though. (In late September a New York Times writer opined that mandating helmet use on otherwise safe bikesharing systems would discourage people from using them.)