Kill a cyclist, get community punishment

Driving with excessive speed is dangerous, survival rates of people who get hit plummet. Parking in inappropriate places (high streets) obscures line of sight for people crossing the road too.

If you break the rules of the road in a car you are being dangerous and could kill or seriously injure someone. That's why the rules were drawn up, that's why there is no requirement for a license to ride a bike. Parking in the street so that cyclists have to enter the stream of traffic is dangerous and selfish, turning or changing lane without looking or indicating probably makes up most of my near miss experiences.

Phone use in cars is a classic example of something that is not being taken seriously by drivers. I've had people laugh at me when I've tried to explain they could kill or injure someone while on their phone and yet phones are implicated in more and more accidents. Most drivers (and this is backed up by a study that suggested that 80%) think they are better than average drivers which somehow permits them to go that bit faster than others without being dangerous, to look at their phone or to speed through on amber or do aggressive maneuvers without being dangerous and yet they are. Obviously the same applies to cyclists, however they are far less likely to kill or seriously injure others (although it happens). The fact is that cyclists are seen as people that don't respect the rules of the road and yet the truth is almost no one respects all the rules of the road at all times. The important thing to remember in this argument are the numbers, the numbers of people killed/injured by cars vs bikes and the rules should be enforced appropriately.

It not about flouting the law, it is people criticizing the validity of it because they don't believe it is fair. Whether that is true or not is besides the point...

Realistically in most situation going slightly faster than the speed limit or a bit of dodgy parking on a high-street isn't dangerous and the penalties are reflected by how severely you are prosecuted.

You've said that the truth of it isn't important, but you've then made a truth claim to justify your position. In fact it is dangerous, but we've done such a good job of designating roads as car-only spaces that it doesn't seem like it, because most of the time there's nobody to hit.

The problem is that humans are terrible at thinking about things probabilistically. If you consistently drive over the speed limit and don't hit anyone you will convince yourself that speed is not in any way a problem because you've never seen the downside of it. When you then consider a criminal case you'll naturally think that the driver's speed can't have been the problem, it was just bad luck that a child happened to step out in front of them (there but for the grace of god etc.). What this completely ignores is that every extra mph increases the probability of a collision if a child steps out in front of you, and increases the severity of injury and probability of death. We should be banning people from driving because their behaviour is dangerous i.e., it increases the probability of adverse outcomes, not only if they are the rare case where the adverse outcome has happened.

Also "going slightly faster than the speed limit" is something that shouldn't happen. The speed limits reduce the severity of impacts and so people should stick to them. Rather than aiming to drive at the limit (30mph say) and not worrying about creeping up to 33mph, you should be driving at 25mph and not worrying if your speed goes up to 30mph. There are a million good reasons to drive below the speed limit (poor visibility, fatigue, parked cars, lots of pedestrians, cyclists, rain, poor road surface, low sun, bad brakes) and no reason other than common-or-garden cuntishness to drive above it.

Yes because there is a feeling that speed cameras and traffic wardens are there to catch you out and raise money rather than actually catch dangerous drivers (like drunk drivers and those that drive at excessive speed).

Aren't speed cameras trying to catch people who drive at excessive speed? Isn't the point of speed limits to standardise what constitutes "excessive speeding"? Ie the bloke who drives at what you think is an excessive speed probably feels the same way you do about going slightly faster than the speed limit - that it's not dangerous. Everybody thinks they know best.