I'm not disputing there are plenty of drivers who operate cars with a similar disregard for traffic laws, but that percentage is significantly lower based upon what I have witnessed.
First - the statement here is just bad mojo. There are all sorts of laws that people disregard. Ever do a minor interior remodel on your house? The percentage of people who pull the proper permits for interior remodeling is near zero. But if the contractor/handyman/owner doing the work follows code, what the hell does it *really* matter. And a lot of times it doesn't really matter if they follow code, frankly.
One driver running a stop sign has the potential to do thousands X more chaos than a cyclist running a stop sign. We know this empirically based on the statistics on accidents, injuries, and fatalities. You can't make a comparison of "number of laws broken" - it has to be multiplied by "impact of breaking that law". Your comparison is like comparing John Wayne Gacy to a someone peeing in public - they both broke the law, after all.
And we design laws to *allow* vehicle chaos, and we have laws that specifically are designed to ignore it.
The speed limit on California roads is set at the speed that the 85th percentile of vehicles drive on that roadway at. So municipalities are supposed to go do a survey of the cars on that roadway, find out what the 85th percentile speed is, and set the speed limit to that number.
So not only are speed limits not set based on any form of "what speed is appropriate" - it's actually set at a number that wwe know empirically that 15% of drivers are speeding.
This before we get into the generally accepted theorem that the cops won't ticket you for speeding if you are going less than ten miles per hour over the speed limit.
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