Making the observation that Philly cyclists, as a group, do behave badly angered quite a few people. I like cycling and cyclists just great, and certainly support making places more bike friendly, but I also think that cyclists who behave badly make those changes less likely, not more. I had people telling me that drivers suck worse and kill people so it was wrong of me to talk about cyclists behaving badly. I also had people telling me that pedesterians suck too, so, neener neener.
But interestingly what I took away from some of the criticism, and did a bit of reading on the internets to supplement this, is that quite a few (obviously I have no way of quantifying this meaningfully) avid cyclists think that disobeying traffic laws is a justified form of civil disobedience, that the laws in place are really meant for cars and asking cyclists to obey the same ones are unfair. Some additionally think that given that they've skilled at what they do, it's perfectly sensible to blow through stop signs and red lights without stopping since they know how do it "safely." This thinking reminded me of super-aggressive drivers I knew (especially) in college who never quite seemed to understand that maybe not every other driver on the road was as good as they imagined themselves to be.
Anyway, I found it interesting.
