Whats the big deal with the video??
Only the last guy actually lane split. All the rest of the lane changes were not in between cars and looked legal to me(minus the solid line). A little aggressive for sure, but nothing ridiculous. They even used their signals which is more than I can say for a lot of car drivers.
First of all, and most importantly, I gotta give you credit for at least asking the question. Everybody else just seems to want to state their opinion as if it's gospel, and expect everybody else to either accept it or move on. So props to you.
To answer your question, it can simply be boiled down to one thing which is that other road users need to know what you are about to do, before you do it. It's part of sharing the road. In this instance there are several ways they failed to communicate their intentions like not signaling, not shoulder checking, changing lanes rapidly, and riding the lane markings. Add to that the fact that they used the ramps to pass and they didn't leave a safe margin in front of the cars they were passing (we would cry bloody murder if a car did that to a bike).
One objection to the above might be "why does it matter if other users know what I'm about to do in advance?" The easiest way to answer that is with examples. Let's say that the car in front was about to change lanes just as one of the bikes was about to do it. The driver of the car wouldn't expect the bike to change lanes before he did as he'd be looking for the first safe opportunity to merge in front of the car in the next lane. So for the bike to not only squeeze across but also accelerate is inevitably going to end up with both vehicles sharing the same piece of road one of these days.
Another example is that all the drivers have to be acting entirely predictably in order for all the bikers to be able to ride so closely and so agressively between them. "Predictably" means that other road users need to know what they are going to do in advance. So why is it OK for the bikers to be entirely reliant upon the predictability of other road users while being entirely unpredictable themselves? Are we are a superior species more deserving of the road then they are? Of course not, and that's why it comes down to a question of "sharing the road". Be respectful of the need for other road users to know what's happening around them just like we need to know.
The real pisser is that one of the things that reduced the danger for those riders is that bikers have a bad reputation, so drivers can somewhat
predict that we will ride like unpredicatble asshats. Now some members of this forum might choose to use that bad reputation as a tool, an opportunity to more safely get away with "owning the road" as the title of the thread so accurately says, but that's not acceptable to me. It's not my road.
Now let me ask anyone who's defending these road users, what on earth makes their riding style OK? Is it simply because they didn't crash???
