Running red lights and almost hitting someone is really really bad, but at the same time, pedestrians don't always have the right of way. In London everyone needs to cooperate because there's a ton of people and not much space.

The closest I ever came to hitting somebody was a middle aged man who full on stepped out into the center divider nowhere near a crosswalk without even looking right while I was bearing down on him with a string of motorcycles behind me. I had one car length to stop, endo'ed up and sort of jumped off to the side of him which I could do because I'm on a mountain bike with great brakes and I ride defensively like you say. If I hadn't been there holding the pace, those motorcycles behind me could have been going and lot faster, and frankly they would have done a lot more damage had they actually hit him. I often wonder how people get hit by buses, but cycle commuting in London has shown me: given enough people someone is guaranteed do something ridiculously stupid and suicidal.

Oh and don't get me started about the tourists at Piccadilly Circus / Trafalgar Square (they won't get hit because everyone who drives there knows the herds of pedestrians aren't paying the least bit of attention to what's going on around them).

This is an interesting reply because it reminds me of conversations I had a few years back.

I live in a town (in the US) which is fairly bike-friendly; a lot of places have nice paved paths and trails separate from the streets, and places that don't have them often have dedicated bicycle-only lanes. But a lot of people just won't use them, so I started asking my friends who biked everywhere why that was.

The responses, almost universally, were complaints about pedestrians -- "they get in my way", "they slow me down", "I never know when one of them is going to pop out from somewhere" -- and basically boiled down to these slow annoying people, I don't want to share my path with them. Which is the exact same attitude they complain about in car drivers.

Pedestrians do have the right of way actually in the UK.

Fat lotta good it does you if you're dead.

True, but then as a cyclist we'd go to prison for killing someone. That's why I have well maintained disc brakes and a healthy respect for traffic signals (as I'm sure you do, also).

Many people don't, unfortunately.