It serves to maintain the legal fiction that a bicycle is an automobile. Strong athletes, who are the people involved in crafting bicycle legislation, prefer it

It serves to maintain the legal fiction that a bicycle is an automobile. Strong athletes, who are the people involved in crafting bicycle legislation, prefer it that way. Pedestrians also prefer it that way. It does a huge disservice to less-athletic people who might benefit from bicycle use. These people are far too slow to be in the road. They really need to be on the sidewalk. They could go in the road opposite to traffic, pulling off whenever a car approaches. Either way, they would walk the bicycle through intersections. The typical bicycle user is far more like a pedestrian than like a car, and ought to be legislated as such, but our laws were written for the most serious and dedicated bicycle users.