I live in London too. As a pedestrian, irresponsible cyclists have really pissed me off to no end.
Many cyclists have an attitude of entitledness, which makes them a great danger to the rest of us pedestrians.
Not all cyclists are like this mind you, but it's enough of a population that I second-guess most cyclists wil follow rules of the road.
To put into perspective - when you're driving and you have a green light, you generally assume cars approaching the red light orthogonally will slow down and respect the stop signal. Now imagine the situation where you cannot assume this and at every intersection you go through, you assume a car will ignore their traffic light. That's what it feels like to be a pedestrian around cyclists in London.
Quite too often cyclists will plow through zebra crossings (crosswalks for you USA folks, where pedestrians have full right of way). Even if you're in the middle already.
A cyclist once came at full speed within inches of my daughter's pushchair (stroller) when we were in the middle of the zebra crossing, and when I loudly said "what the heck" at the guy. He turned back and screamed very loudly "Fuck You", in front of my daughter.
Similarly just the other day a cyclist came through a zebra crossing at full speed about a foot away from me. I again said "what the heck" and he responded loudly "oh, Fuck Off".
A few intersections have cyclists that regularly come through when pedestrians have the green man signal.
It's pretty ridiculous.
>To put into perspective - when you're driving and you have a green light, you generally assume cars approaching the red light orthogonally will slow down and respect the stop signal. Now imagine the situation where you cannot assume this and at every intersection you go through, you assume a car will ignore their traffic light. That's what it feels like to be a pedestrian around cyclists in London.
To put into perspective - when you're driving and you are in the right hand lane going straight, you generally assume cars in the left lane will not attempt to make a right hand turn onto a cross street through your car. Now imagine the situation where you cannot assume this and at every intersection you go through, you assume a car will run you over (without even signaling) to make a right hand turn. That's what it feels like to be a cyclist around drivers in Boston.
Admittedly, I can't put a driver in the place of the stroller anecdote. But I did have a near miss when a parent pushing their child in a jogging stroller came careening around a blind corner without looking and almost crashed into me (I was walking my bike at the time, heard them coming, and got out of the way.)
Isn't the reasoning for the proposal that allowing bikes this special treatment of stop signs and red lights would incite them to use the road instead switching to the sidewalk (to be faster)? I.e., yes, bikers might be entitled, but the suggestion would also benefit pedestrians.
Passing a law that induced bad behaviour from the get go is counter productive.
I've read the article and I've watched the video and it's utterly out of touch with reality from my personal experience. Also we have stop and yield signs specifically for one reason and that is to take out personal judgement out of the picture. Considering the poor judgement I see exhibited by cyclists already I'm not prone to give them any more reasons to justify their current behaviour.
"It's not fun to stop at a stop sign" isn't a good enough reason to let them decide when it's their time to cross and when it's not.
His experiences are with cyclists flouting the existing laws when they travel on the road.
My point is that I do not know of anywhere that a cyclist can hop on a sidewalk at full-speed and not be violating the law.
My concern is that such a move would give further credence to cyclists that they're "above the laws of the road", which would lead to even more of the dangerous types of cyclist behaviour I mentioned above.
I hate out-groups too. Nothing can compare to the entitledness of car drivers. I've been yelled at, swerved at, had trash thrown at me while walking or cycling, often with children. Many drivers seems to consider the slightest inconvenience as a personal attack worthy of violent response with a deadly machine.
Part of my commute down 2nd Ave above the Queens-Midtown Tunnel doesn't have a dedicated bike lane, so I try to spend as little time riding side-by-side with cars as possible. Bike lanes make things easier.
On the other hand, biking in Brooklyn or Queens where the traffic is faster and less predictable (and thus more dangerous), I agree.
This isn't just a to protect the cyclists from being hit by cars, but to protect pedestrians from being hit by cyclists.
I'm sorry but my experience of living in London in the past 4 years pretty much made me hate cyclists with passion.
I find them considerably more dangerous and pesky than cars, they simply ignore all rules whether it's not giving a flying duck about the red signal at a bike lane while pedestrians have the green light to cross the street, utterly ignoring no bikes allowed in the run/walk only paths in Hyde Park or by interchanging road, bike lane, sidewalk and even the crosswalk at will with nill consideration to pedestrians and a shitty attitude to boot.
I'm constantly buzzed off green lights (to me) by cyclists that cycle at high speeds because they could not be arsed to honor a red light, I've been hit by bikes more than once in these 4 years, and just over the weekend I've seen a guy on a rental metro bike hit a baby carriage (empty one as far as i could tell) in Hyde Park because they were in a no-bike zone and came out a turn which has no visibility whatsoever.
I really don't understand the level of self entitlement that cyclists seem to have and why they seem to have such a shitty attitude towards drivers and pedestrians alike. A bicycle rolling through a stop sign isn't any less dangerous than a car rolling through one, if anything a car is easier to spot than a bicycle and cars don't tend to have their visibility shuttered by driving between full lanes.
The reason why most countries do not allow roll through stop signs or at least heavily restrict them is that rolling through a stop sign sets the wrong behaviour pattern because once you get used to a stop sign you know you can roll over you aren't going to slow down to roll over speed you might simply slow down by a bit but not nearly enough to respond appropriately.
The same thing is going to happen to cyclists they'll get use to it and eventually get careless they won't give 2 ducks about the padestrians trying to cross the road with already ludicrously short light times and they'll take more and more risks as far as crossing the intersection goes.
Cyclists don't have mandatory insurance, they can hit anyone and do pretty hefty damage if it's at speed and good luck suing them for anything at least with cars in most countries you can always sue the insurance of the offending driver. Heck at this point I'm not even entirely sure if being hit by a bicycle in the UK constitutes a "road accident" so they might as well just take off and not give a flying duck about it, it happened to me got hit in the side I assume by the stem/handlebars at pretty high speed the cyclist didn't seem to give a shit at all and just wobbled a bit and continued on his way without even checking. It was a sharp pain but not bad enough however the night after half my side was purple if it would be a bit stronger or sharper hit I might've ended up pissing blood for 2 weeks.