Red means STOP! or How I began to hate cyclists.

[mjr]

In France they just hang a small give way sign below the traffic light but in the triangle is a bike symbol and an arrow, and then cyclists may legally treat a red light as a give way if they are going in the arrowed direction. Win win!

[londonbikerider]

Overall, and I know it sounds a cliché, things will never improve until people won't realize the true meaning of the word "sharing". Roads can be dangerous, it is up to all the categories of users, including cyclists and pedestrians, to understand and respect the other user's need for mobility.

This is obviously a can of worms (and a complex topic) but just to reply briefly: we don't currently share in any real sense the road with car users. To be able to share the same space would mean that the faster, better protected, more polluting user would have to make allowances for the slower, more vulnerable, non-polluting user - that would be true sharing. The concept that I would suggest here is that of moral equivalence (itself a controversial idea). Saying that cyclists should respect the rules of the road and the interests of motorists isn't really the correct starting point - we are where we are and in the overall context of road use, I don't see that there is much that can be usefully said about cyclist behaviour (much to the chagrin of people, I would suggest, like you and me who actually believe in rules-based behaviour and mutual respect).

...and most of the road users would steer away from a philosophical approach to things!