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They don't "get to." They are required to stop, just as I am (at least where I live). Some cars chose to disobey this, most to all bikes do. One of the reasons we have this as a requirement is because people can't be trusted to determine when it is safe to blow through stuff.
It's not safe and it is illegal and bikes break the law at much higher rates than cars do (with the exception of highway speeding for the obvious reasons).
Why do cars get a pass for breaking the law for speeding? Because speeding on the highways is relatively safe?
Treating a stop sign as a yield while on a bike is also relatively safe, and is explicitly legal in many areas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idaho_stop
I frequently see cyclists idaho stop, breaking the law in a relatively safe way. I see them straight up blow through lights at full speed a lot less frequently, about the same as I see cars.
And every car infraction is at least 10x more dangerous to others due to size and speed.
I also don't see cars on the sidewalk driving aggressively towards pedestrians outside of rare one off events.
Anyone who has ever been around a random cyclist in any setting for any length of time has noticed irresponsible or dangerous behavior that would get a driver pulled off the road. Cyclists are more safe because they are smaller and slower but e-bikes have changed this calculus greatly.
If you bike you may imagine that you are not one of the problematic ones and this may in fact be true, but I've seen plenty of people who are too irresponsible and poor to own an actual vehicle, or are delivery drivers imported from the third world who think they are in the thunder dome.
False equivalency with highway speeding is insufficient to neutralize this common sense understanding that can be established walking around a city.
Any day I walk in a city for a significant amount of time I see a bike nearly hit a pedestrian multiple times. It is rare to see that happen with a car. If bikes are less dangerous it is not because of a failure of effort.
The point is if you're just angry about cyclists breaking the letter of the law, then to be consistent you should be just as angry at drivers speeding.
If you're concerned about safety, then you shouldn't care about not coming to a full stop at a stop sign, it's a non-issue safety wise. Adopting the Idaho stop, and enforcing the letter of the law against cyclists who fail to even yield would get no argument from me. Enforcing that every cyclist fully stops at a stop sign strikes me as the same kind of thing as stopping every driver who's 2mph over - entirely a waste of everyone's time.
No cyclist wants to conflict with pedestrians - that's why they would prefer dedicated lanes. Would you support adding those to benefit both pedestrians and cyclists (and where there's enough space, it's a benefit to drivers too).
Yes, many poor or irresponsible people ride bikes or ebikes, probably higher than cars. That's not a knock against bikes it's a knock against the poor and irresponsible. In places with higher percentages of bike usage this is much less common. If cycling was nicer, with more infrastructure, this issue decreases as it becomes more attractive to those more responsible people.
No I a concerned about dangerous behavior.
I see plenty. At times an Idaho stop IS dangerous behavior. People are poor at assessing this.
I don't care about "at times" I care about overall, statistically, after making this behavior legal.
The studies that have been done on this (start with the citations in the wiki article) show either no effect, or a positive effect. The people most concerned with a cyclists safety are typically the cyclists themselves, that's why the behavior is so common, it feels safe, and is safe. Stats show very low risk to anyone else.
And like you say you want cyclists to stop, but you actually don't. It's even more annoying waiting behind a group of cyclists all stopping then slowly getting back up to speed. Annoying enough that following the letter of the law has been used as a protest. https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/sf-cyclists-to-protest-stopping-at-stop-signs-with-stop-in/
I mean the point is that lots of people have way more subjective experience of bad behavior from bicyclists. Who kills more is only tangentially related to that.
No it's very related.
If the "bad" behavior doesn't cause harm, then how is it "bad"?
A million reasons. Because it looks bad? Because it's anti-social? Because people aren't qualified to determine what is or is not safe.
If I run up to you and punch the air around your face did I cause you any harm? No.
Does it suck balls and do you want that behavior banned? Sure.
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