According to the article, 80% of motorists and 95% of bicyclists do not come to a complete stop at stop signs.
In Idaho, bicyclists are not required to stop at stop signs.
The elephant in the room is speeding. Speeding is responsible for ~30% of all road fatalities, yet is universally condoned on American roads. Drivers do not understand how hypocritical they are when they complain about bicyclists disobeying road rules while they themselves are speeding.
> Speeding is responsible for ~30% of all road fatalities
That's not true. First, "speeding related" is not synonymous with "caused by speeding". Second, the data that relates to "speeding related" crashes has a significant overlap with "alcohol related crashes". If you exclude the "alcohol related" crashes from the total, you'll find that percentage drops quite a bit.
>In Idaho, bicyclists are not required to stop at stop signs.
Which, personally, I think is completely reasonable. Constantly stopping and pushing off again adds a huge amount of effort to a ride, and a cyclist has plenty of incentive to look before rolling through an intersection.
That argument works even better for cars. Cars are much heavier. It's far more effort to stop a car and get it going again than for a bicycle. It would dramatically improve gas mileage if cars could ignore stop signs.
Getting people out of cars and onto bikes would save even more oil.
We also have 30 years of data from Idaho which allows cyclists to treat stop signs as yields: "Idaho bicycle-collision statistics confirm that the Idaho law has resulted in no discernible increase in injuries or fatalities to bicyclists."
I do. At most intersections, a driver of normal capability should be capable of determining whether there are any other cars at the intersection without completely stopping for multiple seconds. And in reality, most drivers in my area do roll stops and it does not cause an appreciable number of accidents.
I think you also need to account for stopping distances and acceleration.
A bike can stop in far shorter distances than a car can (and will be travelling at a lower speed in the first place).
Bikes are also slower to accelerate than a car. Allowing a bike to maintain more of its momentum gets it through the intersection quicker, especially on any kind of uphill grade.
Anecdotal, perhaps, but I know that my personal experience has been that the combination of those two things means that I'm evaluating whether it's safe for me to pass through an intersection and making the decision much sooner on a bike than I would in a car where the assumption is I need to mostly stop because I may not be able to otherwise.
It only takes a little bit of pressure from your foot on the gas to make the car go. And the mental energy to lighten up on the pressure when the car gets to speed. Or are you referring to the energy that gets expended by long-dead dinosaurs? For that, the cost of my entire trip to work is paid for during my first 5-10 minutes of working -- during which time I'm getting my morning coffee, and flipping through email. So not much energy there either.
Actually, quite a few people on here make more than I do. If you take the median U.S. salary (50K), and median commute distance (10 miles), that is still paying for the trip to work within the first 10 - 15 minutes (depending on car gas mileage). So the effort of accelerating from a stop sign is still way less than a minutes worth of work. And that is the energy that the original (bicycle) post was referring to -- the effort that you feel, not the externalized cost.
Many intersections could be safely altered to use yield signs in one direction, or converted completely to roundabouts. For some reason (and this is purely anecdotal), it seems that a lot of Americans, particularly older ones, seem to be very confused when first encountering a roundabout. I'm not sure why this is, but it may be a contributing factor to the prevalence of four way stops in the U.S. as compared to many European countries.
Of course, in a world where everybody is free to do rolling stops at whatever speed they feel comfortable with, the real issue is that bicycles have a greater incentive to slow down at intersections compared to drivers since the costs of being wrong about one's ability to do a rolling stop are much greater for the cyclist. A cyclist should also be more aware of their surroundings since they are not sitting in a metal and glass box with the radio on.
A lot of unnecessary stop signs are there because someone wanted them there.
Every subdivision thinks they need a 3 way stop at the entrance, so they start complaining and eventually the local government caves and installs one because it's relatively cheap to install a few signs (and it's easier to ignore the traffic engineer who says it's unnecessary than the dozens of people who live in the subdivision)
>We cross at those intersections, and bicyclists, in my experience, don't see us when they're focused on cutting a light (or a stop sign).
Pedestrians crossing at a stop sign have to yield to vehicular traffic, no?
And advocating the Idaho Stop isn't advocating for cyclists to blow through at full clip. Stop signs are treated as yields and have to be slowed for, and stop lights are treated as motor vehicles treat stop signs, requiring a full stop.
Vehicles must yield to pedestrians in crosswalks in many states. Illinois is one of them, yet I find in practice anything without a stop sign you're as likely to get buzzed while someone lays on the horn as you are allowed to cross. I regularly have cars honking at me and trying to pass on the right when I stop at crosswalks on some streets in Chicago for pedestrians. It's as if I'm being a jerk for following the law instead of "the Chicago way"
It is required to yield to pedestrians in clearly marked crosswalks in Virginia, and yet, when I visit my parents and assert my right-of-way at the nearest crosswalk, I have ~20% chance of being flipped off and 40% chance of being honked at.
The author of the original article misquotes the 30% statistic. According to the PDF he linked to [1], 30% of American motorist fatalities are "speeding related." This is not the same thing as "caused by speeding." According to the NHTSA, speeding in this context is defined as
"Speeding is reported in the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) as a driver-level attribute that combines 'driving too fast for conditions' or 'in excess of posted speed limit.'" [2]
Note that, in multi-vechicle accidents, only one party needs to have been speeding for the accident to be considered "speeding related". The 30% figure quoted also seems to vary quite a bit depending on the data you look at:
"The percentage of all crashes that were speeding-related (DTFFC or EPSL) varied considerably among the States, from about 6 percent to about 20 percent of all crashes" (ibid)
The NHTSA distinguishes between two types of speeding:
1) Exceeding Posted Speed Limit (EPSL)
2) Driving Too Fast For Conditions (DTFFC)
The former simply occurs whenever one's speed is greater than the posted maximum. The latter is a subjective call by the police officer, etc investigating the case and factors in road, traffic, and weather conditions.
The NHTSA has found (ibid) that about half of speeding-related fatal crashes occur for EPSL (55%) and the other half for DTFFC (45%). For speeding-related crashes that result in injuries, the respective ratios are 26% and 74% (ibid). The same source mentions that
"The relative proportion of crashes that occurred on the curved sections of the road was much higher in speeding-related (DTFFC or EPSL) crashes"
which suggests that many of these accidents were actually caused by either some form of driver inattention or adverse weather affecting road conditions, and that speeding was a contributing factor in the accident (i.e. less ability to correct for an unexpected event) but not the sole cause. Since driver inattention is almost impossible to prove absent records of an untimely text message or tweet, it's likely that the true causes of most of these accidents (most likely driver inattention or overly agressive driving) go unreported and are instead attributed to the only measurable data point that can be discerned: speeding.
Speeding is a tricky issue because of the wide variety of types of roads. For instance: four lane, divided highways yield fewer fatalities without any speed limits. (This is known as the 'Montana Paradox'). http://www.hwysafety.com/hwy_montana.htm
But then, isn't having an appropriate speed limit for the type and layout of the road still the issue? What makes it tricky, if we consider the safe speed on straight open 4 lane roads to be 90 and an urban street with frequent crossings to be 30?
In Idaho, bicyclists are not required to stop at stop signs.
The elephant in the room is speeding. Speeding is responsible for ~30% of all road fatalities, yet is universally condoned on American roads. Drivers do not understand how hypocritical they are when they complain about bicyclists disobeying road rules while they themselves are speeding.