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Felix Salmon, apparently fresh off a near-death experience while biking on 43rd Street, drops a massive (and interesting!) post entitled “A unified theory of New York biking”. He starts off by examining the relatively well-understood interactions between pedestrians and motorists:

The pedestrian-pedestrian encounter is both chaotic and benign, just so long as you don’t work in the middle of Times Square. (Ahem.) People move slowly enough that they have lots of time to maneuver around each other as necessary, and most of the time, with the help of a little eye contact, large numbers of people are extremely good at walking with and around and across each other.

The motorist-motorist encounter, by contrast, is very highly choreographed, with lights and lanes and speed limits and indicator lights and even a dedicated corps of traffic police to enforce the rules. The rules aim to minimize car crashes, and again, as a general rule, they do a pretty good job.

Finally there’s the pedestrian-motorist encounter, which is based largely on asymmetry: motorists have nothing to fear from pedestrians, but pedestrians have everything to fear when it comes to getting hit by a car. At the same time, their respective spaces (sidewalk, roadway) are very clearly delineated, largely to minimize any need for the two to interact at all. When they do interact, pedestrians take advantage of the rules of the road: a red light, for instance, means that the cars have to stop, so pedestrians can cross against them. Pedestrians trust the motorists to follow the rules, and most of the time that’s what happens.

Bicyclists, on the hand, “feel pretty much completely unconstrained by rules.”

Even in my rather small and sleepy town, it is not uncommon to see people riding bicycles against traffic or the wrong way down streets, sailing through stop signs and red lights, riding on sidewalks, and all sort of other crazy, unpredictable behavior.

My initial response to this analysis is that it is not fair to single out this sort of rule-breaking by bicyclists, when motorists speed all the time, run red lights, fail to signal, etc. However, while that may be true in principle, it offers little comfort when you’re getting run over by a car after ignoring a stop sign.

Pedestrians get away with their occasionally reckless behavior for two reasons:

1. They are generally in a separate space from motorists.
2. They are protected by the same rules that keep motorists from killing one another.

Unlike pedestrians, though, bicyclists tend to be in the same spaces as motorists, so they don’t benefit from #1. When they ignore normal traffic laws and behaviors, they also lose any protection they might have under #2. Long term, the only way any of this is going to change is to have more bicycles on the road so that they constitute more of a presence. In the meantime, I don’t think bicyclists are doing themselves any favors by riding as though they’re the only ones on the road.