Comment by Mawr

Well, if you genuinely find it interesting, I can explain why they don't:

1. Cyclists live and die by inertia. Getting up to speed on a bike requires a lot of effort and every application of brakes erases that spent effort, which feels really bad.

In a car, it doesn't matter — you stop and accelerate with exactly the same trivial effort of pressing a pedal.

So all the grandstanding that cars stop at stop signs (since when, but ok), and cyclists don't is like bragging that you beat a disabled person in a 100m sprint. Good job, I guess.

2. Stop signs and traffic lights are made for cars, because of their speed, how dangerous they are, and how bad their visibility is. Cyclists are like pedestrians in that they do not need traffic lights, they can navigate just fine with just body language.

Telling whether running a red light would be safe in a car is essentially impossible, you're going too fast and can't see much, can't hear anything either. But on a bike you have perfect visibility, there's no box of metal all around you. You can hear quite well too.

Stop signs are an even better example. Literally the only reason for their use instead of yield signs is that the visibility at the intersection is bad enough that you need to stop to be able to yield. But that is only the case because your visibility is so bad in the first place.

Stop signs literally never make sense for bikes — there's no "hood", so your head is basically where the vehicle starts and you can lean forward to make that literally true if really needed, and you've got perfect visibility all around, no blind spots.

Hence why in a lot of places cyclists can legally treat red lights like stop signs and stop signs like yield signs.