We’ve all been there. You’re walking down the sidewalk, minding your own business, when, hurtling toward you, threatening public peace, safety, and sanity, is that horror of all horrors: a bicyclist. Bicycling on the sidewalk is illegal in New York—not to mention dangerous!—and your sense of righteous indignation grows and doesn’t subside until you speak your mind, profanely. Of course, the same scenario can unfold from a different angle. You can be biking along peacefully, following the rules (hello, bike lane!) when, out of nowhere, against the light, a pedestrian walks blithely into the street, with no regard for the rules or your safety. You swerve; cue the expletives. Or you can be driving when a cyclist or pedestrian dashes across an intersection against the light, showing an obvious contempt for your right of way. (Can you get a ticket for that?) Unprintable words follow.

The moral of the story, in all three cases, is the same. Whichever mode of transportation you currently happen to be using—whether you’re the pedestrian, the cyclist, or the driver—you are correct, no matter the scenario. Everyone else is in your way, wrong, annoying, and otherwise a terrible human being.

The fight for the streets is, presumably, as old as the streets. From the moment the first horse and buggy hit the London pavement, hansom drivers and startled pedestrians likely had words. But why does this particular drama play out as it does? And in the modern urban landscape—which includes more people, more cars, and, in recent years, more bikes than ever before—can there be any good answer to the question of who, if anyone, is in the right?

From urban design to interpersonal psychology, a number of factors shape how we experience these vehicular encounters. In his history of bicycling and the politics surrounding it, “One Less Car: Bicycling and the Politics of Automobility,” Zack Furness points out that, almost as soon as automobiles were invented, they became the focal point of urban development: for over a century, cities have been planned around thoroughfares, and cars have been their reigning kings. But automobiles don’t rule only because they’re convenient; they also confer social cachet. From the Model T onward, cars have conveyed a level of power and prestige that’s beyond the reach of other modes of transportation. As the Times put it, in 1922, “As a rule, automobility implies higher individual power, better economic distribution and a potentially higher social state.”

Cars, in short, are status symbols. Just as owning a bike conveys autonomy upon a ten-year-old—you can ride to your friend’s house even in the absence of a willing parental chauffeur—so, too, does having a car convey freedom and power upon the first-time car-owner. A car shows that you’ve accomplished something. You may not be able to own a home, but you can own this one thing, which will take you anywhere you want to go. It’s a feeling of pride mixed with an air of open possibility. Think back to the swagger of the seventies classic Grease: everything you are hinges on your automobile.

For drivers, that sense of proprietorship can lead to a feeling of conscious or unconscious entitlement: I deserve to own the streets because of what I’ve achieved, both fiscally (I can afford this car) and symbolically (I’m in a big metallic monster that can—metaphorically, of course—crush you). As the Lancaster University sociologists Mimi Sheller and John Urry point out, cars cast their drivers in a role of “disciplining and domination” in a way that other modes of transportation, such as walking or bicycling, do not. As drivers, we always have the right of way because we are bigger and better. It’s survival of the fittest.

Power, however, isn’t the only source for feelings of entitlement. There’s also precedence, a sense of I got here first that translates into it’s my right of way. Precedence-based reasoning is everywhere in life. We expect that no one will cut us in line, and we feel cheated when a person arrives to join someone ahead of us in the queue. We think we should earn more than a new hire; we believe that seniority in a group should be respected, and get mad when our status is usurped by an upstart. So it goes when it comes to the feeling of owning the road: precedence comes first.

Technically, that logic means that pedestrians are always right, since walking is how we got around for millennia. But, practically, that precedence doesn’t count for much. As Antonia Malchik argued in an essay in Aeon this summer, in the United States, city culture positioned walkers as newcomers almost right from the start. “Jaywalking,” she writes, “was once a semi-derogatory term referring to country bumpkins, or ‘jays,’ who inefficiently meandered around American cities; by the 1920s, the term was being used to transfer blame for accidents from motorists to pedestrians.” Walking may have come before driving, but alternative modes of urban transport—horses, buggies, trams, sleighs, cars—have cut in line. In fact, the first urban planning centered on pedestrians and bicyclists didn’t happen until the nineteen-sixties, when people like Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs began to push back against auto-centric planning. In cities like New York, ubiquitous bike lanes are a relatively young phenomenon, and the pedestrian islands that now dot Manhattan are products of the Bloomberg administration. In Los Angeles, major bike lane expansions were only approved this year.

In terms of social cachet and temporal precedence, bicyclists are worse off than everyone else. They lose to the precedence game to pedestrians, who can say—even if no one cares—that they got there first. At the same time, bicycles lack the weight and status of automobiles. Cyclists are marginalized practically, too: bike on the road and you’re in the realm of the car; on the sidewalk, you’re in the realm of the pedestrian. Walking is a human ability; driving is an urban right. Bicycling is neither.

Bicyclists, of course, can marshal different arguments that give them the advantage. One factor can overwhelm precedence and power: critical mass. Think of those moments when an errant pedestrian or cyclist crosses against the light only to be followed by a wave of compatriots. Against one, you can honk; faced with a mass, you must wait. As more and more people bike—a trend that’s growing worldwide, in part because of the rise of bike-sharing programs—bicyclists achieve through sheer numbers what their lack of power and precedence has denied them. (In 2006, Ben McGrath wrote about the rising popularity of bicycling in New York.)

And bicyclists have a new argument on their side: moral rectitude, with its corresponding sense of entitlement. Who are you, they ask, to be driving a clunker and killing the environment? I am making the morally superior choice when I get on my bike; I am de facto in the right because I am the better (and fitter) human being. As an argument, it’s hard to resist—especially since, from the moment we invoke moral arguments, we tend to ignore other kinds of reasoning that earlier we found appealing.