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Almost like...they're neither? What you describe here is perfectly legal.
Legal
Imagine thinking cars don't 🤣
Not remotely against the rules
Please define. Because as someone who has spent many hours in a car, I've been prevented from going at the speed I would like to go by other cars far more than bikes. And my life has been put in danger by cars, not by bikes.
The simple fact is that data tells us cyclists and drivers break the law at roughly the same rate at worst. (Incidentally, one study from a place with better infrastructure shows that when good infrastructure is in place, cyclists break the law considerably less often than drivers.) Studies also show that cyclists break the law to keep themselves safe (this has been backed up by multiple studies). When drivers break the law, it's because they think it's more convenient not to bother.
The simple fact is that though @makingStuffForFun@lemmy.ml claims it's cyclists being "dictators" and you claim they "take over the road", the reality is quite the reverse. When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression. And no demographic in our society (excluding socioeconomic and racial discussions) is more privileged than drivers.
Splitting lanes is not legal in the vast majority of the United States but idk where you're from. It's very very rare for me to see a car blow through a red light outright. Both cyclists and drivers should be punished for doing so.
I dont have a problem with bikes. I think there should be huge amounts of protected bike lanes so they can have their own lanes, and i think a lot of streets should be declared off-limits to motorized traffic and only allow pedestrians. But I also think that a lot of people who ride bicycles on public roads are some of the biggest assholes out there
Where I am it's explicitly allowed for motorbikes (at a maximum speed of 30 km/h), thanks to a relatively recent law change. Pushbikes are a different story. There's no law explicitly allowing it, and this has led to some people (even people in positions of perceived authority, such as the social media team of the Department of Transport and Main Roads) to suggest that it's not legal for bikes. But the reality is that it is legal, as a necessary side-effect of the fact that cars are allowed to overtake bikes without leaving the same lane. Basically, bikes are allowed to share a lane with another vehicle, and this has the effect of also allowing a bike to come up through congested traffic.
I find this rather hard to believe. First, remember that an amber light does not mean "be careful" or "get ready, you might have to stop soon". It means stop right now, if it's safe. How often have you seen drivers actually do that? I've had so many times where, as a driver, I saw the amber and found myself in that awkward position where I didn't know whether it was appropriate to keep going or to stop, and eventually decided to go through; a situation where it is obviously going to be the case that anyone behind me should stop, because I was on the borderline, so anyone behind me must be well over the other side of the line. And yet, so many times not only has the car behind me gone through, the car behind them did too. And that's before we even get into the daily cases where they don't even start to enter the intersection until after it has turned red. I've got a mate who rides a motorbike and posts helmet-cam footage on Facebook at least weekly, and every one of his compilations includes at least one case of a driver who runs a fully red light.
For cyclists, recall that there are some places in your own country that explicitly allow cyclists to go through a red light if it's safe. Not everywhere does (nowhere in Australia, to my knowledge), but those places that allow it do it for a reason. Evidence shows that it makes cyclists safer. Not all lawbreaking is equal, and the evidence pretty clearly tells us that when cyclists break the law, it tends to be for far better reasons than the reasons drivers break the law, even though the rate of lawbreaking is the same.