Stop sign behavior — motorists v. bicyclists
Video found at Bob Mionske’s Road Rights column.
Any article in the local paper about bicyclists will be sure to attract many on-line comments about scofflaw cyclists who never stop at stop signs. And it’s been debated in this website, too, with several of my readers wondering why cyclists don’t always come to a complete stop at every stop sign. They argue that we need to start doing so if we wish to be respected by motorists.
But I’ve been thinking about this a lot and have started watching the way motorists deal with intersections more carefully. My conclusion is that whether you are on a bike or in a car, you make a series of identical calculations based on your perceived safety of the intersection, along with the chances of getting caught for rolling through the stop sign.
The difference is that if you are in a car, you can’t determine as quickly how dangerous the intersection is, and this means you tend to slow down quite a bit, or, in rare cases, come to a complete stop. On a bike, you can figure things out pretty quickly, and you aren’t going as fast to begin with.
Take a look at any intersection with a stop sign and watch for the tell-tale backwards motion of a car when its suspension deals with the weight of the chassis on fully-stopped wheels. How often do you see it? Pretty much never, if the intersection is clear. People slow down, look both ways, and carry on.
The video of the intersection above shows this behavior perfectly. The intersection is full of stop signs and flashing lights, but it appears to be very safe, and designed wholly to serve pedestrians (there is no cross traffic). Note the cyclists flying through the intersection. They can see in an instant that there are no pedestrians or oncoming cars and they keep going. The cars themselves slow just enough to make sure there isn’t a pedestrian preparing to leap into the crosswalk.
I admit that you see more cyclists doing stupid things at stop signs than you do motorists, but I think most of us are making the exact same choices based on the information we have available, whether on a bike or in a car. The only real difference is that our speed differential at an intersection is low: we only need to slow down a little bit to satisfy ourselves the intersection is safe; a motorist needs to slow down quite a bit to reach the same conclusion.
The proof would be in the accident data. I don’t know how many cyclists get injured because of stop-sign running, but I bet the percentage is about the same as it is for motorists. Anybody know?
–Erik Ryberg
January 7th, 2010 at 10:01 am
Wow… no one stopped at all unless there was a pedestrian crossing the road; not even the school bus or the city bus!
What I find more disturbing is that only about a third (1/3) of the cars who turned right signaled to do so! As a cyclist in an urban area, this is even more concerning than “rolling stops”.
January 7th, 2010 at 1:00 pm
The available stats aren’t very good, for a zillion reasons. One (imperfect) resource is:
http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/People/PeoplePedalcyclists.aspx
scroll down to “Pedalcyclists Killed, by Related Factors”
One thing that is cool about this effort is that one can select national, state, and year data using the drop-down boxes.
It would be interesting to hear from Idaho DOT regarding experience subsequent to the state’s enactment of “49-720 STOPPING TURN AND STOP SIGNALS.” It may be a while…
At any rate, “STOP” seems to mean, in practice, “yield” and there is plenty of anecdotal evidence to support as TBL points out.
Robert Cialdini, Emeritus Professor up at ASU did some powerful and valid research on persuasion in his early-mid days. Perhaps there are some trying to understand the erosion of persuasion, if not the erosion of exhortation.
January 7th, 2010 at 3:49 pm
Re: 2/3’s not signaling a right = a sure fire right hook accident waiting to happen. This is why you should practice vehicular cycling. I always take the lane at busy intersections, get in line with traffic if it’s rolling smoothly and your speeds match near the intersection. This way you are immune to a right hook (a car turning right in front of you). Otherwise come to a complete stop if you are proceeding straight using a bike lane and traffic is heavy. Look behind you to ensure that you make eye contact with the cars behind you to discourage a right hook.
January 7th, 2010 at 6:54 pm
First point: We can talk until we’re blue in the face about how we’re “special” and can see and hear better than motorists and therefore can determine if it’s safe to run a stop sign without having to slow as much; it doesn’t change the fact that what motorists and others see daily are that the vast majority of bicyclists don’t make a visible effort to slow even slightly or check for cross-traffic before blowing off that sign. Look at the cyclists even in this video.
Second point: As Erik mentioned, the makers of this video apparently hand-picked an intersection without cross-traffic to catch a higher percentage of motorists not coming to a full stop. If this were a busy 4-way stop what you would see (and anyone who cycles 3rd st. *knows* I speak the truth here) would be the vast majority of cars full-stopping to yield the right of way when needed – not unlike the cars stopping when needed for the pedestrian cross-traffic in this video – and unfortunately, the vast majority of cyclists *still* totally blowing off the sign despite cross-traffic or lack of legal right of way.
We (well, at least *some* cyclists) may be making the same choices as motorists based on whether the intersection is clear, but the difference to impartial non-cycling observers between our action vs. a motorists action pursuant to that choice is profound and damning; and we just don’t have the opportunity to stop and explain to all witnesses the reasons why – even if those reasons are legitimate, even if the accident data were to back us up.
This doesn’t convince me in the least that we don’t need to seriously clean up our act as a vehicular class to be taken seriously. The “but cars do it too” argument may seem valid, but it reminds me of my favorite scene in that movie about the early rivalry between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates where Jobs says “but I make a better computer” and Gates retorts “you’re still not getting it – that doesn’t matter!”
January 7th, 2010 at 7:55 pm
“It would be interesting to hear from Idaho DOT…”
I gathered some input from the Idaho state bike cooridinator back when the arizona law was being considered — see #2 at
http://azbikelaw.org/blog/why-i-support-bikes-safe-at-stop-signs/
January 7th, 2010 at 10:23 pm
Oh, wow, Scott nails it:
*what motorists and others see daily are that
the vast majority of bicyclists don’t make a
visible effort to slow*… and…
*but the difference to impartial non-cycling
observers between our action vs. a motorists
action pursuant to that choice is profound and
damning;*….
That image is held and recalled whenever the
subject is raised and cyclists are left with
only being able to agree.
I see this with college student riders; the
elite spandex crowd and, gee whiz, with riders
who are old enough to know better. If I had to
rate a group, I’d say the ‘commuters’ are the
best at it.
‘It’ being riding with some sort of social
conscience.
January 7th, 2010 at 10:48 pm
We cyclists have to be better.
Like it or not, we are the deviants.
And we must conform or even be better
in ways that don’t matter…such as
obeying traffic laws and just being
courteous…so that we may continue
and be acknowledged in our way that
does really matter. If we don’t ride
like it’s really important, no one is
going to think that it is.
January 8th, 2010 at 12:18 am
Very passionate about this subject.
Here is a T intersection same thing going on
http://www.youtube.com/bodybait#p/u/45/RGA3YhfsHhY
Here is a No right turn on red
http://www.youtube.com/bodybait#p/u/44/im9ljMc2S0k
Here is my article on the subject
http://acyclist.wordpress.com/2009/12/24/stop-signs-and-stop-lights/
“Yet it baffles me why we can’t change this law to reflect laws already in place. It is okay for a cyclist to use their own judgment when or when not to ride to the right. Yet when coming to a stop sign or stop light suddenly they can’t use their own judgment?”
January 8th, 2010 at 10:07 am
I’d be willing to bet that motorists wouldn’t be quite as offended when a bike doesn’t come to a stop at a stop sign if it weren’t for the few cyclists that seem to think, not only that they don’t have to stop, but that they always have the right away.
Countless times I’ve come to a stop on my bike at the 4-way stop at Main Gate to let a waiting car have its turn to go, only to have a bike coming up from behind me cruise right past me and through. If I was a driver, I’d have a bad image of bikes because of this behavior too.
February 11th, 2010 at 3:47 pm
You’ll notice far fewer Stop signs in Germany than in North America. Where we’d have a Stop, they often have a Yield, and where we’d have a Yield, they often have nothing but the rules of precendence, which they mostly follow very well.
My personal experience is that motorists in traffic with you don’t care if you stop or not, as long as you yield properly. I can safely navigate a 4-way stop, yielding to all who have the right-of-way, without coming to a full stop (no track stands, either). Motorists not in traffic with you, however, do just a non-stop as unsafe, whether it was or not.
For a personal anecdote, I once come close to a collision with a cyclist who made a perfect foot-on-the-ground stop. She then proceeded to pedal away from the stop sign directly into my path (I was on the cross street and faced no signs) at approximately 3 km per hour. That’s why yielding, rather than stopping, is the critical safety action.