I agree it is politic to avoid RLJing/Pavement cycling to avoid retributive action - I fundamentally disagree with your equivalent of cyclists/motorists duty to obey all motoring laws at all times
Slightly baffled by this argument. What motoring laws? Could you please explain where it says that obeying red lights is such?The primary purpose of traffic regulations is to ensure that road users behave in a uniformly consistent way. Everyone obeys red lights - very few problems or danger to others. I returned to bike commuting at 42 and continued to do so until I retired at 65. I can count the number of occasions that I was put at any risk at all by always obeying traffic lights. I commuted between Bradford / Leeds/ Huddersfield / Halifax in and out of rush hour and was only hooked a few times and never really dangerously. Never met a set of lights that presented any danger to me - not even in Toronto.
The bottom line is any law is justified on the grounds of nuisance or danger to others. Bikes on the whole are not a great danger to anyone but the rider. The application of law is justified where they are a real nuisance. A Nelsonian eye is not unreasonable when they are not. That is what I would hope for as a cyclist. As a driver I do realise that most moving offences are there to control danger rather than nuisance. Especially for the 80% of us who know we have above average ability!
That application of a moving vehicle law may appear inappropriate but the downside on any misjudgement of that by the driver is still dangerous. Hence I seek to obey the law when driving and I would like to see it rather more strictly enforced on other drivers.
Law is a means to an end (road safety) and not an end in itself. Hence its application to pedestrians, cyclists and drivers should be graduated with that in mind. That is difficulty to enshrine in law but historically applied through the discretion in prosecution. But every council/police station will have their quota of legal jobworths.
The law is graduated - otherwise, pedestrians would be subject to US-type jaywalking laws. We are allowed to ride up inside traffic, even tho' (unless there is a specified lane) drivers may not.
Traffic laws consist of sets: an overall set which cover all vehicles and horses in the overwhelming majority of circumstances; subsets apply specifically to different types of road user but these are relatively few, e.g. driving hours for lorry drivers; specific weight limits, ditto; some highways are forbidden to cyclists and pedestrians and vice versa; speed limits for motor vehicles but not for bikes; helmet laws for motorcyclists; speed limitations for commerical vehicles and so on.
Normal speed limits take into account your argument: cyclists aren't, as a rule, capable of exceeding even the 30 limit and even if they do, they are relatively unlikey to hurt someone else if they collide with them, so there is no requirement for any speedo on a bike because it's not worth while to do so.
As for RLJing, I, like many others on this forum, have been waiting at red when another rider has ignored it. How many times has this been because the junction is dangerously designed? Have I been in an alternate reality? Or has that rider simply regarded stopping at red as some kind of imposition - after all, a common argument is that it's hard work getting going again, whereas all a driver has to do is put his/her foot down - poor ickle diddums.
In those 23 years of city riding, I could count on fewer than 10 fingers, the number of occasions when my safety was seriously threatened, including being knocked off on Odsal roundabout at 9.30 one November evening. I did make a habit of reviewing every one of those incidents and other, less threatening, ones and working out how I could have avoided them. It's strange, the more I thought about them, the luckier I got.
