I hesitated talking about this in my post, but I should have. There are two different reasons to consider for pedestrians having priority over cars, unlike ove

I hesitated talking about this in my post, but I should have. There are two different reasons to consider for pedestrians having priority over cars, unlike over bikes. First, as the sibling comment says, there is no energy personally spent by the driver to stop and start their car. It's effortless, while in the case of a bike, the energy is the biker's own. The other reason is that it is generally more difficult to cross a stream of cars that don't stop compared to crossing a stream of bikes that don't stop. Cars drive faster and cannot really deviate from their path (more than a few tens of centimeters) while bikes drive slower and can more easily move while staying in their lane to make way for a pedestrian without stopping. Of course, reading comments here (and generally, comments on American websites) you would think that bikers in general are found in the form of a swarm of dangerous, malevolent savages that are totally unpredictable at best. Maybe that's the case in the US (that was definitely not the case in Québec when I was living there but that's my only point of reference in North America) but it was not the case in any of the cities of Europe and Asia where I've lived. Bikers are just more averse to stopping because they are more physically affected by it than users of other forms of transportation, and not because they are a despicable subspecies of humans with a particular propensity towards bothering others.