I ride bikes, E-bikes, and cars, and am also a pedestrian on roads, and I have strong feelings based in experience some of you may not have.
First-if I have no option, there are no sidewalks, and I am not hitch hiking, I do not walk as a pedestrian in the same direction as traffic. I always walk against it. And I watch it closely as it approaches.
However, riding a bike or an e-bike against the flow of traffic is not only illegal, it is dangerous.
It is highly dangerous, for the simple reason that car drivers are not expecting you on a bicycle from that unexpected direction, and as a result, you increase the chances of a bicycle-car collision, and that is almost always a one-way street towards injury or death for a cyclist.
As I said, I speak from experience on this matter.
A few years back, I came up to a busy intersection in my car while commuting to work. At that hour of the morning, traffic is almost always bumper to bumper, and almost always stopped at the intersection. It is probably one of the worst intersections in the state I live in.
From the diagram above, I am in the red car, stopped at the line of traffic, and pulling through the gap left by a motorist to my left. On this morning, there was a camper just to the right of the gap, so I had ZERO visibility to cars coming from the right. My only option here is to enter the gap in traffic and poke the front of my car ever so slightly into the lane traveling in the opposite direction so the oncoming cars, if any, would have a clue that a car was pulling out. Then, pulling out a little more (still with enough room for any oncoming car to maneuver around me) I can get even more visibility, and then I have to gulp and floor it.
In this case, as I came up to the road, the oncoming driver to my left stopped and left a hole. About a 100 yards away, in a straight line of view, I saw a bike coming on my side of the road, riding in the "bike lane" (or breakdown lane) on my side.
I craned my head to look to my right, but I had zero visibility due to the large camper there. I took one more look to the left, didn't see the oncoming bike and assumed he had turned off somewhere, so I pulled out into the gap, and poked my car ever so sightly, craning my neck even further, but I still couldn't see beyond the camper. I nosed out a little more, then floored it to enter the opposing lane that was traveling right to left from my perspective.
When the bike collided with my vehicle on the left side of my fender, I saw, in high resolution, full color, super slow motion, the cyclist, his bare calves, biking shoes on feet, somersaulting in slow motion over the hood of my car. His black, open mouth was the only part of his face from the video clip in my brain that was discernible, the rest was pale and featureless.
Along with him, his expensive carbon fiber bicycle was somersaulting in perfect unison with him, as if in a choreographed dance.
The cops asked me if I remembered seeing the bike before I pulled out, and I said that I had, but the bike had disappeared by the time I did pull out.
Apparently, the cyclist had cut through a gap in traffic himself, before he reached where I was, and was riding down the yellow line that separated the two directions of traffic. I did not know before, but found out this is called "lane splitting" and is illegal in my state, but is legal in some states.
The bottom line is, I was not expecting a bike to be riding the yellow line in the middle of the road, and didn't even look that way when I pulled out and his bike ran into my vehicle.
And that is the same reason I think riding your bike against traffic is extremely dangerous. If I had been pulling out into that traffic the same way, I would not have even given a glance to the breakdown lane on MY side of the road and seen a bike coming towards me. I gave a cursory glance, but it wasn't sharply to my right in the breakdown lane, but to the right and up the road looking for oncoming cars in the lane I was trying to cut into. Pedestrians have leeway in that they can, if walking against traffic, see a car and step off into the grass or whatever if someone strays into the breakdown lane. Bikes often don't have that advantage, but may actually be making it MORE likely to have a collision with a vehicle since drivers don't expect them there, coming towards them.
As for my collision, I didn't kill the guy, though they took him away in an ambulance. But for about six months, I saw repeatedly in my head, that little super-slow motion, hi-res video of the cyclist and his bike somersaulting over my head. When I woke up in the morning, it was the first imagery in my head. When I went to sleep, that was the last thing I saw. During the workday, if my mind was not immediately occupied, that little video would play in my head, in super-slow motion, full color, high resolution.
But it did go away. I have to drag it up now, but I can still see it.