Stopping traffic

We live right along the central north-south artery into Bergen, and the city is installing a light rail transport right up our street. This makes travel into the center by car a good bit more difficult, particularly during rush hour. This isn't really our problem, though, since we walk or bike 90% of the time we go into town, but pedestrians and cyclists have to run a bit of an obstacle course themselves. We've got to cross under the main road in order to cross back, and then thread our way across the bridge within a eight-foot gap between the fences that separate all incoming foot and cycle traffic from the ongoing construction work. It's certainly not an optimal situation, but it's substantially faster to bike than to drive or even take the bus, since dedicated bus lanes exist only on certain short bits of the route.
We're OK with this, since we think the light rail will be a good thing once it's up and running, and we're willing to live with the inconvenience of constantly shifting traffic patterns. Right now, all the traffic from up at the hospital is being detoured right past our door, which makes for lots of cars at rush hour, but since we don't drive to or from work, it's not a real issue for us.
What has begun to concern me is the fact that people are really getting pissed off. Commuters sitting in long, immobile traffic queues tend to get irritable. Bike sales are up 100% over last year because people are realizing it's faster (and healthier, and better for the environment, and cheaper) to bike into town, even if you live a number of miles out. So we've got lots of new cyclists of differing levels of experience, clogging the bike paths and a lot of motorists getting angrier by the day. Watching the cyclists blow right past them into town isn't making them like cyclists either. The local paper is very irresponsibly encouraging all this anger with daily articles on how traffic sucks (not exactly breaking news) and giving everyone a forum to express how pissed off they are about motorists, cyclists, pedestrians, or the light rail in general.
The most recent article was an interview with the head of the local traffic police, who basically accused cyclists of being kamikazes and traffic scofflaws and was actually quoted as saying that if a cyclist doesn't dismount and walk his bike over the crosswalk where a bike path meets a road, the driver doesn't have to stop to avoid hitting him. Thanks a lot, asshole. Tell drivers they can just mow down cyclists -- the death penalty for breaking traffic laws in a country where two yahoos get only 58 hours of community service for beating a man senseless on a Friday night in the town common because they think he might be gay.
Some bicyclists certainly do zip in and around cars in a way that is neither safe nor allowed by traffic regulations. There are lots of new cyclists out there, and the traffic situation is difficult for bikes as well. I ended up in the middle of a very busy intersection in the work zone on Wednesday with nowhere to go because a bus cut off the three-foot gap in the Jersey wall I was supposed to use to get out of the road and onto the continuation of the bike lane. This on a stretch I bike to work every single day. People are going to screw up, and emotions are already running high. I've heard more angry horns and yelling from drivers in the last couple of months than the rest of my time in Bergen put together. How about pointing out that people should follow the rules of the road and what they are, and encouraging both motorists and cyclists to have a bit of patience and understanding for each other during this difficult period?
No, that would be constructive. It wouldn't sell papers, either.
We bike Ella to day care since it's a lot faster, and there's a dedicated bike path almost the whole way there. It's fairly common here, and there are bike seats and helmets for kids as young as Ella. Still, we do have to deal with some traffic en route, and I'd really rather the paper stop aggravating an already bad situation by working to turn the motorists against the cyclists. The cyclists may have greater maneuverability, but collisions between a juggernaut of steel and a guy on a bike tend to be pretty one-sided.