Mayor Greg Nickels has made it his mission to transform Seattle into the most bicycle-friendly city in America. But has he considered what that might do to the erections in this town?

According to this frightening article, traditional bike seats are a bunch of ticking impotence timebombs. September’s Journal of Sexual Medicine apparently has several articles showing alarming findings from studies of the bike seat issue, along with an editorial warning of bike seat perils — compressed pereniums, constrained Alcock’s canals, bike cops who can’t get it up at night. (Could this be the reason Seattle’s finest are sometimes so grumpy?)

Pray for the penises of this bike-friendly city…

In a bluntly worded editorial with the articles, Dr. Steven Schrader, a reproductive health expert who studies cycling at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, said he believed that it was no longer a question of “whether or not bicycle riding on a saddle causes erectile dysfunction.”

Instead, he said in an interview, “The question is, What are we going to do about it?”

The studies, by researchers at Boston University and in Italy, found that the more a person rides, the greater the risk of impotence or loss of libido. And researchers in Austria have found that many mountain bikers experience saddle-related trauma that leads to small calcified masses inside the scrotum.

This does not mean that people should stop cycling, Dr. Schrader said. And those who ride bikes rarely or for short periods need not worry.

But riders who spend many hours on a bike each week should be concerned, he said. And he suggested that the bicycle industry design safer saddles and stop trivializing the risks of the existing seats.

A spokesman for the industry said it was aware of the issue and added that “new designs are coming out.”

Dr. Goldstein said he often saw patients who were stunned to learn that riding a bicycle led to their impotence. One middle-aged man rode in a special cycling event to honor a friend and has been impotent since. A 28-year-old who came in for testing, Dr Goldstein said, showed the penile blood flow of a 60-year-old. A college student who had competed in rough cycling sports was unable to achieve an erection until microvascular surgery restored penile blood flow.

"We make kids wear helmets and knee pads," Dr. Goldstein said. "But no one thinks about protecting the crotch."

The safest seats and saddles, experts say, force the rider to sit back firmly on the sit bones so the perineum is protected.

Dr. Schrader advocates saddles that do not have noses. After finding that traditional saddles reduced the quality of nighttime erections in young policemen who patrol on bicycles, he has persuaded scores of officers in several cities to use noseless seats and is now studying the officers' sexual function over six months.