Although, if two cyclists collide in an intersection, that's the unstoppable force vs immovable object scenario of assigning blame.
I am a bike commuter, but guys like this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dFimQobFGo) give us a bad reputation.
Stand at an intersection and count how many times light turning red does not have a car sneak right after. Or stop with half the car over the stop line. Or motorcycles being in front, in the bike-only area. Or drivers who treat bike lanes as "oh I'll just stop here 10 minutes, who cares?".
My experience with cycling in cities is that you quickly discover that basically nobody obeys any traffic rules. Cyclists are just the ones doing it the most blatantly, because honestly when they do it it's not actually that unsafe.
I think it's likely that many cyclists blatantly violate traffic rules because they aren't even required to remotely know traffic rules before riding
There is no training or licensing required to cycle
Car drivers are required to be both licensed and insured
I would guess some percentage of cyclists, the very serious cyclists, will know the traffic rules better than almost anyone on the road. The rest will be on par or worse than your average driver
Somehow we understand motorcycles aren't cars so we allow them to lane split but a cyclist rolling through a red light is the end of the world even though they pose minimal danger to others.
Not that this matters; we're discussing a local maxima of vehicular cycling. These issues largely disappear once you build separated cycling infrastructure.
Much like a deer running in front of traffic, cyclists behaving unexpectedly is a danger of causing other people to wreck in reaction to their behavior
> It does not make sense to have the same exact set of rules apply to such different vehicles.
It actually does because the rules define how we use the space not how we drive our vehicles
Exactly the same reasons in some countries it's common for pedestrians to walk against a red light.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-29/why-bicyc...
The thing is cyclists who are running the lights are more visible because it triggers the jealousy of other users having to wait who thus ignore the majority of cyclists who are actually abiding to the rules and waiting, and the huge amount of motorists who floor the accelerator and run the light after it changes (and is only a small fraction of all the rules they don't follow).
The other reasons some motorists feel cyclists obey less to the rules is because motorists feel more entitled to bend them at their wishes than other, the worse at that being the one driving as part of their professional duties.