Well... I'm both a pedestrian and biker (and I generally use a car when outside my city) and honestly, I find it normal for pedestrians to give priority to bikes.
It's just a lot more energy expensive to stop and start again for a bike, while it is essentially free for a pedestrian.
As a pedestrian I always try to avoid making bikes stop unnecessarily, and most people seem to do the same here, even if pedestrians technically have priority. Most people here are also bikers at times, so I suppose they understand this better than pedestrians in places where bikes are seen as something special/annoying/for other people.
Well if energy output is your reasoning: then it's orders of magnitude more energy for a car to come to a full stop and re-accelerate than it is for a pedestrian to let it pass.
Should cars then have priority over people in a crosswalk?
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.
> there is no energy personally spent by the driver to stop and start their car
Funny, in a way. An old ... acquaintance used a corollary of this back in the 90's. Because he drove a truck, stopping it and then getting it moving again took considerable amount of energy. Much more than what a pedestrian would require.
As such, he considered himself having the drive of way over pedestrians and the heavier the vehicle he was driving, the better the reason he had to run the lights. And if necessary, over pedestrians.
Why is energy expenditure the metric we're using to judge who should stop? In my opinion the metric should be this: whoever has the highest capability to cause injury to another person should be the one who has to be more careful and considerate. Injury is more consequential and potentially life-altering than energy expenditure. From this perspective, motor vehicles should give way to bikes, bikes to pedestrians.
Not for the driver. This isn't an environmental argument. This is an argument that a pedestrian just has to stand for a moment, a driver just has to slightly move their feet, and a bicyclist has to do a bunch of physically strenuous shit to stop.
It's just a lot more energy expensive to stop and start again for a bike, while it is essentially free for a pedestrian.
As a pedestrian I always try to avoid making bikes stop unnecessarily, and most people seem to do the same here, even if pedestrians technically have priority. Most people here are also bikers at times, so I suppose they understand this better than pedestrians in places where bikes are seen as something special/annoying/for other people.