Comment by PaulDavisThe1st 9 hours ago
It isn't chaos. It's your subjective assessment that you are now sharing the road with another, different vehicle and that this is a problem.
That's your choice to make, and the one you're making now is not invalid or indefensible. It does, however, remain a choice.
The one thing that makes sense to me about lane splitting is that it's quite dangerous for a motorcycle to be stopped behind another car. If the car behind them doesn't stop, they get squashed between two cars with zero protection. By moving between the lanes of cars they avoid a lot of that risk.
On the other hand I think lane splitting motorcycles are still surprising to most motorists, and surprise leads to a lot of accidents.
They greatly expand the plausible possibility-space of what might happen, and in-fact they use large parts of that space regularly. Cars might do things they shouldn't but the list of things-they-shouldn't is fairly small in practice, as far as what you actually see happening with enough regularity to worry about, and their size keeps them from doing things like passing the stopped vehicle in front of them, shifting onto the sidewalk, crossing like a pedestrian (never having stopped), and then shifting back onto the road, which is a thing I've seen more than once and my lifetime interactions with bikes while driving is probably not above the very-low four digits.
Of course that's chaos. Cars approaching an intersection have a really small set of things they're more than 1-in-100,000 likely to do. It's fairly predictable. Bikes can do and in fact do all kinds of different things. It's way, way harder to read their intentions or likely next actions. The space of what they might do includes basically all the same things a car might do, plus a whole bunch of other things. All while they're extremely vulnerable.
I don't get your point in emphasizing that this is a choice. Some kind of Stoicism kick? Like sure OK yes all emotions are a choice, sorta, kinda, OK, I got there and actually did the reading literally decades ago, I get what you mean. I'm trying to express that bikes being on a road introduce a whole lot of extra stress for drivers that yet-another-car does not, as a reason that many drivers even if they are very careful around bicyclists and do not hate them at all are still bummed out when they see one on the road.
[EDIT: FWIW I'm about 50% as sad to see a motorcycle as I am a bicyclist, for similar reasons that they have a wider set of things they are likely enough to do that I need to worry about it (the small size is a lot of this, in both cases) and in fact do insane shit all the time (I've certainly seen a lot more wheelies-while-speeding-in-traffic from motorcycles than bicycles, LOL). Only 50% as sad because they can keep pace with flow-of-traffic, which makes for less passing with extreme speed differences, and they're far less likely to do something truly nuts at an intersection (though I still can hardly believe "lane splitting" is legal, it seems batshit crazy to me)]