So you don't like my suggestion that observing "when traffic is not working properly" indicates the need for particular watchfulness in that direction. But you have offered, if my memory serves, hesitations and deviations from course as indicators; I just don't see any particular difference. So be it.

However, when you say that there's no difference between the "rules" and the "rules of the road for drivers of vehicles" you show your ignorance of the most important aspect, for cyclists, of American traffic law. I don't know how Danish or Dutch traffic laws treat cyclists; your view is probably based on what you know so that you don't appreciate the significance of the American system. I have described it before, but that appears to have passed by you without your noticing it.

American traffic law has two major classes of road users: drivers and pedestrians. I won't discuss pedestrians further. Drivers are all those who use the roadway, typically with wheeled vehicles, and they have specific rights and duties, generally worked out to provide a reasonable balance between safety and efficiency (often called convenience in legal terms). This system enables all drivers to operate together according to one set of rules for drivers of vehicles that are designed to eliminate collision-causing conflicts, and that works for cyclists as well as motorists. There are subclasses of drivers: streetcar operators, motorists, and cyclists, each subclass with specific additional rights or duties. For example, motorists are not allowed to race, nor to follow dangerously closely to other traffic, both of which are reasonable restrictions for safety. However, the rules for cyclists (written and enacted by the motorists who control traffic law) destroy the normal rights of cyclists, limiting them to the edge of the roadway or to a bike lane, often to facilities that are defective. Motorists claimed that this is a reasonable safety restriction, but it has been demonstrated to be nothing but a legal assertion of motorist superiority, cyclist inferiority, to make motoring more convenient. Of course, that simple restriction cannot work, so there are exceptions saying that cyclists can sometimes obey the standard rules for drivers of vehicles. The result is confusion, with motorists so sure that cyclists' prime duty is to stay out of the way of motorists, with cyclists never knowing which set of rules to obey, or to obey none at all, and with government unable to teach cyclists because of the conflicting legal policies.

That is why I have to be so insistent on cyclists obeying the rules of the road for drivers of vehicles. That is the method of operation that provides reasonable safety with reasonable convenience, results which so many American cyclists fail to understand.