After having spent a ridiculous amount of time on a bike recently, I now believe the difference is perceptional. When you drive you are in a glassed in box. The

After having spent a ridiculous amount of time on a bike recently, I now believe the difference is perceptional. When you drive you are in a glassed in box. The glass has no anti-reflective coating so you see a lot of moving reflections. This makes peripheral vision mostly useless. You have blind spots that you have to move your head to overcome. Your line of sight is lower to the ground. You can't hear anything outside the car unless you have your window down and then probably not either. You can't talk to anyone, the best you can do is honk your horn in an slow speed possible collision situation. So compared to a cyclist/pedestrian a driver is deaf, dumb and partially blind. So it makes perfect sense that cars have to stop and other transportation modes do not. This disparity becomes quite poignant when someone in a car stops to let a cyclist/pedestrian cross the street when they actually have the right of way. They are expecting the cyclist/pedestrian to trust their life to the judgment of someone who is quite isolated from the environment.