It's not true that decisions can't be made quickly by democratic governments. There are truly thousands of counter examples, but to take a single one, in the COVID-19 pandemic, many democratic governments took rapid decisions. Some of these decisions turned out badly and some well, which provides a second stumbling block to your thesis: decisions taken quickly can be bad as well as good.
Secondly, it's not true that totalitarian regimes act quickly. There's a governmental bottleneck of the ruler and his clique. If they're not paying attention to a given issue at a given time, decisions can't be taken at all, making for less efficient governance. And, in practice, such decisions as are taken are often not implemented: you end up with rune-reading and kremlinology by officials trying to work out what an order 'really' meant, or whether it really was an order, because there's no clear method for governing other than 'Do what the leader said'.
I appreciate, by the way, that you're making a devil's advocate argument, here. Just wanted to explain why it's wrong, as OP seems pretty disposed to believe the devil!
I can imagine an alternative, but the reality is that such an alternative has never arisen.
The imaginary 'good' version of totalitarianism, I assume, is one where there's a 'good' dictator who is also so intelligent they're able to run everything very efficiently, where everyone enjoys or at least accepts the dictatorship because everything gets better for everyone. But that's a very odd utopian daydream. In reality, being a dictator and being good are mutually incompatible.
EDIT: Read this back and realised I'm describing the plot of Red Son!
Totalitarian regimes are fundamentally not a sensible way of organising society at any level, even if we for some reason decide to ignore the manifold human rights violations committed by totalitarian governments. There is a longheld belief that they are in some ways more 'efficient' than democracies (as expressed in the myth that 'Mussolini made the trains run on time' -- he didn't) but this isn't true.
To take two obvious points of comparison, North Korea, the closest to a completely totalitarian regime of any country on Earth, is one of the poorest countries in the world. South Korea, a democracy, is one of the wealthiest.
Some of the blame here lies with media depictions of cyclists as arrogant, inconsiderate, etc. But those lies would never stick if it weren't for the shoddy infrastructure that puts cyclists and cars in the same spaces when they should be kept separate.
Because all those safety features don't prevent cars from being the place you're most likely to get a traumatic brain injury.
It's quite illustrative how furious you are about this. If you read what I'm saying properly, you'd see that I don't think people in cars should wear helmets. My point is that the arguments for doing so are just as good as they are for cyclists, i.e., not at all.
The solution is to design roads where these conflicts and confusions don't happen. For example, you can have a lighted pedestrian crossing for car lanes adjacent to a raised, unlighted crossing for the cycle lane.
But the safety precautions in cars are clearly inadequte, because many people still die. We didn't look at cars and say, 'No need for airbags, we already have a safety precaution in the form of seatbelts'.
I once read an article about a kid who was killed by falling masonry while sitting on a bench. Clearly, we should require bench-sitters to wear helmets in case of falling masonry!
But it is a logically sound reason to ask, if they're required for cyclists, why not in cars?
And hey, why stop at transportation? I'm sure wearing a bike helmet makes it less likely that I'll suffer a serious head injury if I fall down the stairs at home, so I'd better start wearing one inside, too. It's the socially responsible thing to do.
I don't know about local laws regarding bike helmets in NYC, but the reason they're not mandatory in most places is that they don't save lives. In fact, wearing a helmet in a car is statistically more likely to prevent you from getting a head injury than it is on a bike. Most cycling fatalities and serious injuries are a result of being crushed, not hit in the head, whereas, in the UK, anyway, most head injuries happen inside cars.
You're no more dangerous cycling at 3kph than you are wheeling your bike at 3kph, but one of those things is illegal if you do it over a stop line, regardless of anything else you do once you're over the stop line. That's the absurdity.
So, your comments here are kind of confusing. If I understand you right, you're making a distinction between motorbikes (which as the name suggests have a motor) and pushbikes (AKA bicycles - the kind of thing you pedal). This study is about bicycles, not motorbikes.
As to licences, most jurisdictions do require motorcyclists to have a licence, either a full driving licence or a specialist motorbike licence (sometimes both).
Cyclists do not require a licence. While of course they do have the capacity to be 'annoying' (because they're human beings), bicycles are both much simpler to pilot and much safer than either motorbikes or cars. In other words, while cyclists are annoying, motorists are dangerous. There's a qualitative difference.
Buses are actually the safest form of road transport. Granted, I've had a couple of bus drivers nearly hit me on my bike, but that's not representative!
It's not true that decisions can't be made quickly by democratic governments. There are truly thousands of counter examples, but to take a single one, in the COVID-19 pandemic, many democratic governments took rapid decisions. Some of these decisions turned out badly and some well, which provides a second stumbling block to your thesis: decisions taken quickly can be bad as well as good.
Secondly, it's not true that totalitarian regimes act quickly. There's a governmental bottleneck of the ruler and his clique. If they're not paying attention to a given issue at a given time, decisions can't be taken at all, making for less efficient governance. And, in practice, such decisions as are taken are often not implemented: you end up with rune-reading and kremlinology by officials trying to work out what an order 'really' meant, or whether it really was an order, because there's no clear method for governing other than 'Do what the leader said'.
I appreciate, by the way, that you're making a devil's advocate argument, here. Just wanted to explain why it's wrong, as OP seems pretty disposed to believe the devil!