Where do you draw the line? Do you know how many laws people do not respect on a daily basis? What's next, filming your neighbor jaywalking on an empty street and reporting it to the police? And everybody cheering?
Common people...
Contrast much of Europe, where speed enforcement is done by camera. I got a $20 mailed ticket for driving 5kph over the limit. Fair, easy, scales with the offence, and there's not an excuse to pull over people for racial profiling.
So yes, I would love to live in a world where people got tickets for jaywalking on an empty street. Because that would encourage us all to respect laws, and would also encourage reform of laws that aren't working.
Unfortunately, reform takes time, and there's a lot wrong with the system. Until then, I'm not judging the "regular person snitching," particularly if they're complaining about behavior that's dangerous to others.
I'd love to live in that world. Because that world would exist for a week at best before jaywalking stopped be a crime, speed limits went up by 20 across the board and stop lights and signs gained all sorts of complex rules allowing drivers and cyclists to not actually stop in many cases (and all sorts of other laws regarding other issues would be revised similarly). The laws would be changed to reflect how people actually live and that would make dolts who conflate legality with morality a much smaller problem for society. We have procedural mechanisms to make it harder silly laws from being passed. Authoritarians are far less of a danger to people when they have to force their shenanigans through those processes than they are when they simply need to convince enforcement to target this or that issue.
People on their phones in traffic certainly is.
Whether it's dangerous while sitting still is arguable: certainly if the vehicle isn't in a parking lot and the driver isn't paying attention then they might not notice emergencies they're blocking.
A whole minute.
Stationary.
I'm pretty sure as far as "letter vs spirit of the law" goes, this is pretty much the opposite of what lawmakers were worried about when the "no texting while driving" law was passed.
If I were a policeman I'd be arresting the cyclist for reckless driving beside cars while not facing forward, stopping to intimidate drivers, and causing arguments with drivers affecting the focus, calm, and therefore safety of their onward journey.
Secondly, I cannot agree with "laws that are commonly broken shouldn't be laws" even if we replace laws with municipal bylaws.
People commonly smoke where they shouldn't, don't clean up their dog's poop, park their cars wherever they want, litter and improperly dispose of items and whatever not. So, hey, let's get rid of the rules?
If we are going to clean the system of laws that should not exist, we arguably should prioritize those that are commonly broken, but that can't be the sufficient condition. If we don't prioritize those that are broken, we may waste time repealing weird laws covering situations that hardly occur, so the work will have no practical impact.
Whether a law should be repealed must be carefully considered on a case-by-case basis, not based on considerations like whether people are breaking it like it's going out of style.
I'll counter with this: widespread lawbreaking only occurs when laws are selectively enforced or not enforced at all. For instance, most people jay walk because they don't expect enforcement. No one in my town expects dog waste laws to be enforced. Those who pick up their poop do so because they're decent human beings. If you wanted to stop dog waste, however, you could step up enforcement to discourage law breaking. This would work with many commonly broken laws. Singapore is famous for this approach. Therefore, I still think commonly broken laws should be repealed. If the law is important, then it should be enforced. If it's enforced, then people won't break it.
Another reason that commonly broken laws should be repealed is that having laws on the book that are selectively enforced is dangerous. They give those in power tools to exploit people they don't like. For instance, traffic laws are frequently violated, but they are selectively enforced. Police use selective enforcement of these laws to target black drivers. There are many examples in the entire justice system where selective enforcement of laws has been used as a tool for suppression. Having this legal grey-area where some people can break the law and some can't is ripe for abuse.
Which brings me to my final point regarding countries that have poor safety for women. In corrupt countries, the law exists as a tool to maintain power of a small group of rulers. The mechanism of this control works in a similar, but more extreme, way to how selectively enforced laws can be abused in less corrupt countries. It doesn't make sense to talk about repealing laws in a highly corrupt setting because our fundamental assumptions about what a legal system should do don't hold up (serving and protecting people, maintain social order, etc). Thus, it's not surprising that the most dangerous countries for women also rank extremely high on measures of corruption. In such places, the law basically doesn't matter.
What you don't want is there to be some pattern to the selectiveness. Certainly not due to corruption (the enforcers turning a blind eye to some select individuals), but even if there is no such corruption, the patterns are hard to avoid.
Just because people figure out that they can get away with something doesn't mean it shouldn't be a law. There may be reasons why it shouldn't, entirely unrelated to the popularity of breaking it.
Even if generally enforcing a law seems hopeless, if the law is in place, it can be used in certain situations. Like dog poop. A neighborhood having problems with a particular offender can lean on that law to get something done about them, even if there is no enforcing to help with someone randomly bringing their dog (e.g. by car) from another neighborhood to have a poop.
Where I live, streets have an implicit 3 hour parking rule. Street segments which have no signage about parking, and are available for that purpose, essentially have an implicit, invisible "Parking 3H Max" sign.
Nobody will actively enforce it; you can park your broken down old van in front of someone's front yard and leave it there for months. If nobody calls to complain, likely nothing will happen to that vehicle.
The law exists there for complaints; you can lean on that.
You can also lean on it in situations like this: you shoveled deep snow for an hour and a half in front of your house to dig your car out and create a clean parking spot. When you come back from your errand, your dickhead neighbor, or someone else, has parked there. If they stay for 3 hours, you can have them removed.
That's the concept you're missing; laws do not have to patrolled by active policing that looks for infractions. Enforcement can be complaint-driven. If you repeal a law that is often broken without causing a problem, you take away the basis for someone to have an actionable complaint in those situations when it does cause a problem.
Or when a black family moves into your neighborhood, you can enforce random laws to intimidate them to leave. Sorry, but you don't own a spot just because you shoveled it out. Either people can park there, or they can't.
That is correct! But the city does own the spot, and it has rules about parking on it. Those rules apply equally against everyone, in principle. But they will never be enforced spontaneously. Someone has to complain, with some valid basis. It exists for these kinds of nuisance situations.
The city is very sympathetic to the concept that some uses of city property (in principle available for use to everyone and anyone) may be annoying to nearby residents.
For instance, some residential streets that are close to transportation amenities or shoppping/business areas have permit-only parking. Only people who can provide proof of residency on a specific street can get a permit to park there; anyone else is in violation, subject to ticketing and towing.
The city recognizes that situation as a valid complaint and will take action, and that's the end of it. It upholds the concept of parking being associated with adjacent residences, even though it isn't owned by them.