> We can argue about whether these requirements are
  > adequate, but it's absurd to suggest that they don't
  > exist.

Maybe I phrased my point poorly. My point was that people in cars tend to want to hold people on bicycles to a higher standard of road awareness than they hold themselves to. There's rarely a sense of, "Maybe I should be more careful," and more often a sense of, "You should just get out of my way."

A reasonable analogy would be hunters and guns. Hunters are required to get both a hunting license and a gun license (barring bow hunters, etc). If someone is wandering around in the forest during hunting season, who is the person that should be more aware of their surroundings. We can argue that both people should be, but the hunter is the person with the deadly weapon.