Why the emphasis on bike lanes in US cities? Putting unarmored people on unpowered vehicles on the same transit medium as multi-ton high-powered enclosed vehicles with reduced visibility seems like a recipe for disaster. Hell, I rode a motorcycle for a little while here in Japan and stopped because I wasn't comfortable commuting to work and sharing the road with kei cars, let alone Cadillac Escalades or F-150s like in America.
While riding on scooters in Hanoi with my Vietnamese friends, I learned the "ways of the road" there: small things yield to big things. Dump trucks and other large commercial vehicles drive however they please. Cars get outta their way. Then cars drive however they please, and all the mopeds kinda swarm around them and move over as necessary. Smaller vehicles are more nimble and generally have better situational awareness, so they can react more easily. Operators of smaller vehicles take it upon themselves to avoid death at the hands of the larger vehicles. In a city where people on two wheels are like 95% of all street traffic....big vehicles have traffic priority. As an aside, ALL motorists strike me as hyper-alert and competent compared to the typical American. Vietnamese on Vespas avoid collisions at the last second with lightning-quick reflexes and maneuvers that tough-guy American biker dudes I know could never pull off. It's pretty amazing.
But cyclists in the States....they seem to argue "everything bigger than me on the road must adjust to accommodate me", even though they are the physically-smallest vehicles on the road, and the smallest minority of commuters. It all seems ass-backwards to me.