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Traffic Optimization: Cyclists Should Roll Past Stop Signs, Pause At Red Lights
Lasrick writes: "Joseph Stromberg at Vox makes a good case for changing traffic rules for bicyclists so that the 'Idaho stop' is legal. The Idaho stop allows cyclists to treat stop signs as yields and red lights as stop signs, and has created a safer ride for both cyclists and pedestrians. 'Public health researcher Jason Meggs found that after Idaho started allowing bikers to do this in 1982, injuries resulting from bicycle accidents dropped. When he compared recent census data from Boise to Bakersfield and Sacramento, California — relatively similar-sized cities with comparable percentages of bikers, topographies, precipitation patterns, and street layouts — he found that Boise had 30.5 percent fewer accidents per bike commuter than Sacramento and 150 percent fewer than Bakersfield.' Oregon was considering a similar law in 2009, and they made a nice video illustrating the Idaho Stop that is embedded in this article."
"Boise... 150 percent fewer than Bakersfield." How'd they manage that?
IAAC (I Am A Cyclist). However I think that people who treat riding a bike as if they own the road are asking for trouble.
It doesn't matter if you SHOULD have right of way. It matters if someone will see you and stop (and not run you over). When you come up to any dangerous intersection (or any intersection) you should slow down, look to make sure you're not going to get plowed into, and THEN go.
As a cyclist, you might be going 30 KPH easily, but you're much easier to miss for a motorist because you are so small, and you might come at an odd direction (most people aren't used to making sure there's no cyclists on the shoulder).
There's a classic trollish article for you.
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How 'bout ticketing the jerks who disrupt traffic by rolling through intersections, break up the 30-bike pelotons, and otherwise make them actually obey the law? Maybe they wouldn't have so mny accidents if the riders weren't abnoxious.
If it had been motorcyclists, rather than bicyclists that tailgated the SoCal guy and hit him when he stopped, there would never have been the travesty of justice as his murder conviction.
Yup, idiots blasting through red lights is a big no. Thankfully that is not what the article or anyone is proposing. In Idaho, red lights can be treated as stop and go for bicyclist. Running red lights is still illegal, and fines are much higher than other states/cities and are enforced. Bicylist are also allowed to make rolling stops at stop signs. Which means slow down, to make sure the intersection is safe, and yield to other vehicles, and if there is no one, just proceed. Blasting through a stop sign is a big no, too.
clearly you didn't watch the video or even probably read the article.
So, have you ridden a bicycle in a commuting type situation? I've read before that converting many stop signs to yield signs, even for cars, would save all sorts of energy without significant increases in accidents.
With a bicycle it's all about energy conservation. When I'm biking it takes me significantly longer to get up to speed, and my top speed is still well below that of the vast, vast majority of cars.
As such, I typically have much longer to assess an intersection before I reach it, my stopping distance is extremely short, but if you make me stop it extends the time I'll be in the intersection when I DO cross significantly. If I'm allowed to use a stop sign as a yield, I'll attempt to time my passage such that I'll cross near my maximum speed, clearing the intersection expediently. Being through quicker reduces the chances I'll be involved in an accident there.
As a bonus, this way I'm less in driver's way, making me less likely to piss them off.
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I use a bicycle as my primary means of transport year-round, in Sweden.
The main issue I have is that I often have to slow down not just to compensate for road conditions as such but also for motorists who don't realize that even with studded tires a cyclist might not want to ride as aggressively in winter as they do in summer (by "aggressively" I mean more "trusting others not to run you down after they've clearly seen you" than "break the law", in summer my brakes work flawlessly and if Mrs Soccer Mom or Mr Middle Management in their late-model Volvo decide to suddenly try to bully me out of the way I can hit the brakes or accelerate quickly, in winter such aggressive moves will cause me to fall and get run over by the idiot in question so I ride much more defensively which seems to annoy a lot of motorists).
FYI, I tend to stick to bicycle paths when possible but some have been taken over by pedestrians (who have the right of way on bike paths here in Sweden, "yay") to the point where it's faster and mostly safer to ride on a parallel street than zigzag between pedestrians who are walking four abreast and paying no attention to cyclists and other times the bike paths were clearly laid out by someone who doesn't cycle him-/herself and doesn't realize that looping a bike path around an entire city block is likely to be an unpopular move.
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" perhaps my opinion is clouded as to their reasoning"
Their reasoning is that cyclists don't obey the rules anyway, so why not legalize the behavior so they have one more way to bitch about cars not yielding to them.
Seriously, I live near a university town, and cyclists are terrible about obeying traffic laws, they'll glide through stop signs, ride the sidewalks when convenient, etc. Then they'll turn around and complain that cars don't treat them as equals on the roadway. Well, you can't have it both ways, if you want to use the right-of-way, you need to follow the same rules as everyone else. I have no sympathy for the self-righteous assholes. (not all, but a very large and visible number behave that way)
If it's safe for a bike to glide through stopsigns or treat all stoplights as signs, then it's safe for motor vehicles to do the same. In fact, it's recognized that this is sometimes the case - that's why there are blinking red lights. There's no reason to give bikes any special treatment.
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How about instead of a 3rd set of rules for the road, cyclists just pick one and fucking stick to it?
You're implying that there's only 2 sets of existing road rules. As a multiple license holder I assure you it's quite normal and reasonable to have different rules for different classes of vehicles. I have 4 different classes of license, all with different rules. Perhaps instead of getting all angry you should accept that the current rules aren't working (by the simple fact that you are clearly already all angry about cyclists in relation to the current rule set), therefore the only logical conclusion is for some changes to be implemented?
It depends on which you are using at the reference point. If the raw numbers are 40 for city A and 100 for city B, then city A has 150% fewer accidents than city B when city A is the reference point, but 60% fewer when B is the reference point.
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In many developed countries now, road and petrol taxes are essentially punitive taxes: the state wants to make driving more expensive so that more people choose to use public transportation (or cycle) instead. As cyclists are not harming the environment or contributing to gridlock on city roads, then there is no reason they should be expected to pay the tax. Maintenance of roads is out of the general state budget anyway, not just paid from the taxes extracted from drivers.
As a cyclist who commutes year-round in Chicago, I just want to give a little shout out to the motorists, who are almost all incredibly polite. It's human nature for us to notice and remember the jerks (and I recall a few) but the incredibly vast majority of motorists are accommodating, friendly, and (when paying attention) cautious.
If I have one request of motorists, it's to get off the cell phones, something I am sure every road user -- pedestrian, cyclist and motorist agrees with.
The Idaho rolling stop law doesn't make taking your right of way legal. In fact, it makes it illegal. The proposed Oregon law increases the penalty for doing it. If you got to the intersection first in your car, you get the right of way. This is how I treat stop signs when I'm on my bike: if a car got there first, I stop. Unfortunately, they then usually motion me to go, which is really annoying, because I already stopped, so they aren't doing me a favor, but they think they are, so I have to be nice about it. One of the arguments in favor of the rolling stop law is that it avoids this annoying dance—drivers know what the law is, and are more likely to follow it, and so do bicyclists. The problem with the law in many states now is that it's bogus, so bicyclists and drivers collaborate to violate it.
It's really funny when someone says "I'm a professional, so my opinion matters more than the data." Well, maybe funny is the wrong word.
No, this means that you don't understand physics. If I come to a full stop and then go, I am going slower, so the time during which I am exposed to cross traffic is longer, which increases the likelihood that I will get hit. So at two-way stops, any bicyclist with a strong sense of self-preservation and long lines of sight goes through the stop sign without stopping. It doesn't mean that we blast through without slowing down, but we do try to keep as much speed as we safely can. Life is full of tradeoffs...
That's simply not true as a blanket statement. Where do you live? Certainly not in the US, where the current Federal Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices specifically addresses this:
As a quick check, both CA and FL laws reflect that usage, as is to be expected.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
OK, so let's make a fair road tax for the cyclist. What could be fairer than basing it on how much damage a vehicle does to the road? So let's charge cyclist just $5 (or equivalent thereof per year), and have everyone pay proportionately to road damage.
Since road wear goes up approximately at the fourth power of axle weight, a bike has usually around no more than 50kg per axle. A small car is about 600kg per axle, so causes roughly 20,000 times as much road wear and so to be fair should pay 20,000 times more. Now how about that $100K a year road tax? Too much? Well to tax the cyclist fairly, the amount would have to be so tiny it's not worth collecting.
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To those cagers who blame cyclists for ignoring laws, I point out in Kansas, a motor vehicle is supposed to give a bike 3 feet of clearance. They don't, and the law is never enforced.
Last time I checked, "but moooooooom" was not a legal defense for breaking the law.
As in, "but moooooooom, the car drivers get to break laws, and no one goes after theeeeeeeem".
I'm sorry, but the answer to that isn't to give you a free pass to break laws, it is to crack down on the car drivers.
Now, to address your post: The reason bikes should have more latitude than cars or trucks is that bikes, considering their smaller mass and lower power, are much less likely to cause injury to another road user. Bikes can safely ignore many traffic laws meant for cars and trucks.
Right, because the injuries that you could cause are totally the reason for the laws. It isn't like we're worried about the injuries you might sustain. Which if it were just yourself involved, I'd say "go for it", throw your life away. But no, you involved me, the driver that hit you, who now has to live with the knowledge that he just killed another human being.
I don't want that guilt, so please, stop being a douche and obey the traffic laws.
Hence the point of the article, which discusses what happens when that "shit" stops being unexpected.
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