Hmm well, we have some "smart traffic lights" where I live that are always red unless a vehicle goes over a metal detecting loop under the road in front of them. Guess how well that works for any vehicle that's not a car.
Rules of the road are generally designed in the same way — for cars. Nobody cares about carving out obvious exceptions for bikes, like the Idaho stop.
Well, if you genuinely find it interesting, I can explain why they don't:
1. Cyclists live and die by inertia. Getting up to speed on a bike requires a lot of effort and every application of brakes erases that spent effort, which feels really bad.
In a car, it doesn't matter — you stop and accelerate with exactly the same trivial effort of pressing a pedal.
So all the grandstanding that cars stop at stop signs (since when, but ok), and cyclists don't is like bragging that you beat a disabled person in a 100m sprint. Good job, I guess.
2. Stop signs and traffic lights are made for cars, because of their speed, how dangerous they are, and how bad their visibility is. Cyclists are like pedestrians in that they do not need traffic lights, they can navigate just fine with just body language.
Telling whether running a red light would be safe in a car is essentially impossible, you're going too fast and can't see much, can't hear anything either. But on a bike you have perfect visibility, there's no box of metal all around you. You can hear quite well too.
Stop signs are an even better example. Literally the only reason for their use instead of yield signs is that the visibility at the intersection is bad enough that you need to stop to be able to yield. But that is only the case because your visibility is so bad in the first place.
Stop signs literally never make sense for bikes — there's no "hood", so your head is basically where the vehicle starts and you can lean forward to make that literally true if really needed, and you've got perfect visibility all around, no blind spots.
Hence why in a lot of places cyclists can legally treat red lights like stop signs and stop signs like yield signs.
As a general rule, the the frequency illusion[1] and the negativity bias[2] are a thing and combined make shallow, single-datapoint arguments like yours instantly invalid.
[1]: "The frequency illusion is a cognitive bias in which a person notices a specific concept, word, or product more frequently after recently becoming aware of it."
[2]: "The negativity bias, is a cognitive bias that human cognition is relatively more affected by a negative affect than an equally potent positive affect."
> By being a pedestrian or cyclist, you’re literally in other people’s workplace.
Are you actually serious right now? If I'm walking/cycling to work, which I usually am, then what? Is your job more important than mine? How can you possibly tell where I work or where I'm going? Ridiculous.
It definitely is a real problem, although I cannot say with certainty whether it's a significant enough problem to make curbside lanes worse than roadway lanes.
Smokers are incredibly obnoxious. Smoking at a bus stop? Why not? Under open windows? Sure. On sidewalks, so that I have to breathe that stuff in when behind them? Sure.
What's that? Smoking at bus stops is banned? No problem — just move 5m away and smoke all you want, the wind carrying the smoke towards the bus stop all the same :)
And such laws are not realistically enforceable anyway.
This gets easier to answer once you consider that, unlike an alcoholic, a smoker directly harms others around him, not just himself. And that's just on top of all the indirect damage.
And then, even as for strictly the damage he does to himself, cancer is far from the only risk.
I won't comment on whether it's acceptable to speed or not. I don't think that's the point.
Most highways I drive on exhibit a predictable pattern. Slower folks in right lane. Faster folks in left lane. Maybe those slower folks are at the speed limit, or above, or below. Left lane folks somewhat faster.
Should everyone obey the speed limit? Sure! Hard to argue that point.
My observation was a Tesla driving at - let's call it "right lane speed" in the left lane. Maybe slower. Slow enough that you'd soon see a predictable back-up behind the car - some tailgating, brake usage, etc. The stuff that in my view leads to more accidents, swerving, and phantom traffic that occurs when people pile on each other, use brakes excessively, and end up slowing to a crawl.
FWIW: The "is speeding acceptable" question is somewhat resolved by police. I rarely see people pulled over for speeding within the flow of traffic, vs. somewhat swerving in/out or just driving much faster than everyone.
Don't remember the last time I saw an officer pick a car out of a normally flowing left lane to issue just that one driver a ticket.
Rules of the road are generally designed in the same way — for cars. Nobody cares about carving out obvious exceptions for bikes, like the Idaho stop.
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