Like, a lot of their behavior seems to be centered around gaining respect and focusing on having car drivers defer to bikes, while bikes slough off responsibility and behave dangerously.

For example, bike lanes. I, as a person who primarily drives a car, believe that what should happen is that the curb should be extended into the road, and bike lanes put up, on the curb, next to the sidewalk. If the goal is mitigating harm in the event of accident, then placing bikes beyond the curb will be the safest movement, rather than having them be a dedicated lane literally in the road. Having them be, ideally, up on the curb in their own dedicated lane is the safest solution we can come up with. The second, is that if there is no dedicated lane, they should be on the sidewalk not on the street.

We can do the math on collisions. A soft body going under 15 miles per hour with high alertness and high reaction time (a biker) is less likely to collide with another soft body going under 5 miles per hour with high alertness and high reaction time (a pedestrian), and if they do happen to collide, the injury will be very minimal.

But a soft body going under 15 miles per hour colliding with a 2 ton metal machine going 30 mph with lower reaction time (a car) is going to be more likely and lead to far more intense injuries for the biker.

But for some reason bike advocates don’t want the safer option, they want to be in the road. They want to be in the road with the cars while cars give them deference and while also completely ignoring traffic laws that vehicles on the road are meant to be following, including them.

I live in a large metro area, and I have not once seen a biker follow any kind of traffic laws. They don’t stop at stop signs, they don’t indicate turns, they don’t even stop at stop lights. They swerve out of the bike lane, into the crosswalk so that they can count as ‘pedestrians’ and then swerve back into the bike lane once they’ve gotten to the other side.

And given that, legally speaking, if there is any collision between my car and a biker, I am automatically considered at fault because I’m operating a motor vehicle, I want there to be as little chance of that as possible.

Like, I’ve got a long rant going here, but don’t get me wrong, what I want is for my town to be safer for bicycle travel, and for all of us to reduce our dependency on cars for travel, but when I see the way bikers behave it makes it hard for me to believe that that’s what they want.