Originally Posted by
livedarklions
No one's saying that there would be no rules, but they would be simpler and more flexible. Cars move faster, are harder to stop, have well-known blind spots, and the consequences of incidental impact are much worse. Most of the traffic rules are predicated to some extent on those factors.
To take a specific example, I have real doubts about the viability of an Idaho stop in a place such as where Manhattan where large numbers of people get around by walking.
It just stretches too readily to pedestrians having to defer to bikes in situations where the pedestrians are supposed to have right of way as the light is in their favor. Certainly see enough of that already in city centers where there isn't an Idaho stop law and the cyclists are not just violating pedestrian right of way, but breaking the law to proceed at all.
That's not to say it wouldn't be nice in low density settings or hours - the problem is that laws are blunt instruments so contemplating changing them hits "give an inch, take a mile" concerns.
In the supposed urban cycling utopias the cyclist pedestrian interplay seems to be more regimented not less. And far from being free to keep going unsubject to rules written for cars, cycle traffic actually ends up slower.
Where the Idaho stop thing actually works is rural and town/small city settings where non-car user volumes are low enough that pedestrians and cyclists are mostly dealing with cars, rather than each other. Even there its not infrequent that there's perfect gap in traffic for something like a vehicular left, but can't take it because there's a pedestrian crossing the target street. Those are the rules, and with good reason.