I've cycle commuted for significant periods of my life and heard that kind of argument from motorists plenty of times. It simply doesn't match the reality of h

I've cycle commuted for significant periods of my life and heard that kind of argument from motorists plenty of times. It simply doesn't match the reality of how drivers behave. First, motorists often just have no idea how to drive sensibly around bikes and do weird things that contravene road laws and common sense - not leaving any passing margin, passing way too close right before red lights, cutting off bikes that they've just overtaken to turn right. Second, motorists will get aggressive and impatient with cyclists that are riding in the most perfectly considerate and legal way. I've seen motorists get irritated with cyclists if they get delayed more than a second or two. That happens all the time with other cars - if the car in front of you is turning, it's going to delay you the same amount as if you have to slow down to safely overtake a cyclist. It goes both ways too - some motorists get upset if you ride in a textbook manner (occupying a lane as needed, doing hook turns, etc) and some get upset if you don't do that (they think you should be riding in the gutter or the sidewalk or whatever). Third, if you look around, you'll see cars breaking minor traffic laws more frequently than people. In my old neighbourhood I kept an eye on how often different vehicles blew through stop signs, and cars did it with frequency and in far more dangerous ways than bikes. Just look at the statistics about how many deaths are attributed to cars behaving badly versus bikes. The only way I can explain it is two things. First, people get confused when they have to interact with cyclists, because they don't really know what they're doing, and as a result get frustrated and angry. Second, motorists are primed to be annoyed at cyclists because they're different. It's hard to get annoyed at the car in front of you delaying you by a few seconds by its simple presence, because you yourself are also a person in a car. The complaints about cyclists doing this that and the other are red herrings - if cyclists stopped doing them, the people complaining would find another way to rationalize their frustration. I think all road users should up their game, but it's cars that are the big problem.