I bike. Not every day, but enough. I obey lights, I signal, I don’t do anything overtly stupid. At the end of the day, I weigh maybe 170 and I’m moving next to objects that weigh maybe one to two tons moving anywhere from five to 45 miles per hour. In any bad interaction, I’m the one who’s probably ending up dead. So I’m really sick and tired of this goddamn bickering back and forth. Everyone should follow laws, yes, but roads should be designed to be not deadly for cyclists, and drivers (which includes me) should understand that they’re moving a very heavy object very quickly, and the onus is on them to do it safely. If that’s not possible, maybe fewer people should be allowed to drive.
'Course, in Phoenix, there are verrrry few pedestrians and so colliding with them is not very likely provided one goes at a sane speed and uses bell / voice to alert folk you're behind them, but still, it'd be nice to not be more or less compelled to encroach on pedestrian space while cycling.
It doesn't matter if you are a pedestrian walking 5kmh or biker going 30kmh, when cars drive 50/60 kmh. Not even going into topic of roads outside of cities, those fools riding in 90kmh traffic when there is 0 extra space on the side of the roads are basically asking to be killed by somebody not momentarily paying enough attention to the road. Even if 99.9% of the drivers do drive carefully, that 1 out of thousands drivers can become a real event pretty quickly on popular roads. Emergencies and morgues have visitors because of these.
Now how to achieve a good situation for everybody in Dutch/Danish style is a great question, especially in congested centers of the towns that are already designed and there is often no extra room for dedicated bike lanes. I don't claim I know the proper answer that would be OK with majority of the population of average western country.
Even a narrow yellow bike lane on the side of the road would be great but I don't see them as often as I should, meaning there are not enough continuous bike paths that take you to most part of the cities. At least not around the place I live.
This doesn't seem like a good example to me because it seems totally right and reasonable to actually stop at stop signs. Being predictable in traffic is vital no matter what type of vehicle you operate.
In Oregon we just passed a law that lets cyclists treat stop signs as yield signs. I ride a bike as my main form of transportation and additional visibility and low speed of bikes makes this a no-brainer--it's quite obvious whether cars or pedestrians are approaching as you approach a stop sign.
Anyway the great thing is that I seem to make some drivers angry just by being on a bike.
Luckily we don't have to rely on gut-checks for things like this, there is a ton of related study. Notwithstanding the occasional bone-headed move by cyclists, the single largest factor seems to be poor infrastructure.