I do not live in an Idaho stop state, but I do it regularly.
I live in a country that doesn’t allow Idaho Stops. In fact, those in charge aren’t even interested in it.
But I use them because I know it’s safer. I also treat red lights at empty intersections like a stop sign, because being forced to wait 10+ minutes for a car to stop so it can change to green is discrimination by design.
I’ll also point out that 99% of DRIVERS are using Idaho Stops, so don’t expect cyclists to oBeY tHe LaW.
Laws of course differ, but I was under the impression that a light can be treated as a stop sign if it is not functioning properly (not changing in a reasonable amount of time). It’s apparently referred to as “dead red”. A cyclist isn’t going to trigger a sensor-driven light, and a sensor sensitive enough would be going off all the time, so it makes sense when all is clear to proceed.
99% of drivers aren’t doing Idaho stops. That implies slowing, looking for traffic, and yielding if there is any. I see a lot of just going through the stop sign or even red light for a turn, half-ass looking as the turn is made, usually with a visible phone in their hand. Lots of close calls. Self-driving cars get a lot of criticism (and they should, to get better) but damn, the humans out there really suck too for different reasons.
Laws of course differ, but I was under the impression that a light can be treated as a stop sign if it is not functioning properly (not changing in a reasonable amount of time).
If it’s not working, then yes, everyone is expected to treat it like a stop sign. But I’m talking about lights where they will make you wait BY DESIGN, because they only respond to cars and trucks.
A cyclist isn’t going to trigger a sensor-driven light, and a sensor sensitive enough would be going off all the time, so it makes sense when all is clear to proceed.
Our region has started to put up sensors specifically for cyclists, and they reduce the wait time by a lot. They aren’t meant to change the lights 100x a minute, but are meant to make intersections a bit more balanced.
But these are at 0.01% of the intersections in the region, so it means very little to me. It’s an expensive project for something that the very free Idaho Stop can solve.
99% of drivers aren’t doing Idaho stops. That implies slowing, looking for traffic, and yielding if there is any. I see a lot of just going through the stop sign or even red light for a turn, half-ass looking as the turn is made, usually with a visible phone in their hand.
LOL. Fair play. I see more stop sign and red light runners in motor vehicles than I do cyclists behaving badly.
I once saw a car make a right turn at a red without even slowing down, nearly hitting a crossing pedestrian (an old man). The driver THEN slowed down, but only to yell at the pedestrian… There’s something about being in a metal cage just turns people into lunatics.
I’m North Carolina and a few other states, you must wait for 3 cycles of the light before moving through the red. I got stuck on Monday at a 5 minute red light. So I was there for 15 minutes.
I can sort of understand the 3 logic, but some lights are going to be a problem, like that one. Then there’s the lights that get stuck and there’s no cycle, what then?
Story time. I was heading for work one early morning when there is virtually zero traffic. Waited as usual at a light to get on the highway, and across from me was a dark patrol car. So hell no, I’m not going to try and go through it. So I wait. And wait. It wasn’t terribly long, but it was pretty obvious the light that usually would trigger quickly wasn’t going to change. Kudos to the officer - he recognized that I was stuck in a bad place and wasn’t going to make a move, so he flashed his blue lights just for a sec as a signal that he got it, and I was good to go. I looked for traffic, and went my way.
which is pretty obvious for a vehicle that works largely by maintaining momentum
All vehicles benefit from momentum. Stopping and starting is huge energy suck, except in vehicles with braking recovery systems in which case it’s only a less bad energy inefficiency. Braking energy capture is never 100% efficient.
This logic (“muh momentum!”) can be used by every conveyance to justify rolling through stop signage.
There is a difference between a vehicle you have to power with your own muscles and a vehicle that you power by moving your big toe on the gas pedal. of course they all benefit from momentum, but I’d much rather have to come to a complete stop and then start up again in a car.
No sympathy for the environment, huh?
With drivers decelerating and stopping at lights, then revving up to move quickly when lights go green, peak particle concentration was found to be 29 times higher than that during free-flowing traffic conditions. (https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/02/why-traffic-lights-are-pollution-hotspots/)
In a city the size of Atlanta, 269,000 tons of CO2 emissions could be prevented, equivalent to the CO2 absorbed by a forest 3.3 times the size of Atlanta, according to Inrix. (https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1135482_poorly-timed-traffic-lights-add-to-greenhouse-gas-emissions-here-s-an-estimate-of-how-much)
That latter article is talking about how many tons of CO2 could be reduced just by better optimizing traffic in the city so that fewer cars hit red lights.
No argument, getting rid of cars would have the biggest positive impact, but failing that, optimizing lights for cars, while not helping cyclist safety, would be a much better investment if we want to reduce pollution. Idaho stops for cyclists from the OP post would actually be detrimental to the environment based on the conclusions from the study: that allowing it makes drivers more cautious, implying more full stops, more time idling, and more CO2 produced per car trip.
Roundabouts.
+100 on roundabouts. We have not nearly enough in the US, although they’re becoming more popular. A little troublesome for cyclists, though, because cars never stop. It’s a worst-case situation for bikes.
I live in Minneapolis, which is graced with 98 miles of bike lanes and 101 miles of off-street bikeways and trails. When industry turned from blue to more white collar last century, they tore out all of the old railway lines and converted it to paths. It’s the most incredible bicycling in the US, bar none. “Share the road” isn’t an issue, because you can get nearly anywhere in the greater metropolitan Twin Cities in dedicated bike paths, often without ever having to share a street with cars, except to cross.
I’m in a closed suburban neighborhood; within two miles are still farms and horses. Yet I can get on my bike, ride 5 blocks through the neighborhood (OK, with cars for that part), get on a Rail Line (they’re still mostly named after the rail lines they used to be), ride to a park, through it, onto another line, and all the way up into the nearest town 5 miles away to an organic grocery store. I have to cross 1 road on that entire line, and along a road-ajacent bike path for a half mile. And I could ride all the way across the Cities to a suburb on the far side - 47 miles - on dedicated bike paths. Some of those are bike lanes, but still; I’ve lived here for 7 years now, and it still blows my mind. The network is truly incredible, and something to be proud of. Most of the native cyclists, from the online removed I read, have no clue how good they have it.
Many cyclists here - the spandex & clip-shoe types, still ride on the road with the cars, even when there’s a perfectly good, paved bike lane next to them; I chalk that up to basic Midwestern passive-aggressiveness, but I’ll grant that maybe there’s a good reason for it.
Anyway, that kind of strayed off the topic of round-abouts, but if you’re a cyclist, Minneapolis is one of the best cities in the world in which to live.
As long as they are done correctly. I’ve seen many new roundabouts that are two lanes wide and allow people in the middle lane to turn out of the roundabout. Only the outer lane should turn out, otherwise there’s essentially a stop sign because you never know what the other cars are going to do.
I would love, love love to see more roundabouts here, there’s a lot of inertia against them though.
I was talking from the perspective of the effort involved in a full stop on a bike vs a car. You seem to be taking the position that cyclists doing an Idaho stop will never stop or look around, that it should all be on car drivers to avoid oblivious idiot cyclists who will ride out in front of them without warning. I guarantee you any of those states that have this law will still find the cyclist at fault if they run a red light and get clobbered.
If you want to change the topic and talk about whether I have “sympathy for the environment”, I also drive an EV. I replaced my gas furnace with a heat pump. I ride my bike instead of driving a car for most of my <10mile trips. Having the ability to roll a stop sign or proceed through a red light when it’s clear has nothing to do with any of those things.
OK, let’s look at only the effort, then.
“Effort” is energy. Whether on a bike, in an EV, or in an ICE vehicle, it takes energy to stop and then accelerate. The arguments in favor of Idaho stops applies equally to all vehicles: if the study does prove it increases safety by making drivers more paranoid - and it’s not clear that it does, as others have pointed out - then it applies equally to all conveyances. Drivers being more careful at stops because anyone else could be legally rolling through a stop sign applies whether it’s a bicyclist or a semi truck. If the argument is about less energy use, then the argument is even stronger for cars because it’s far more energy expensive for them to come to a complete stop than it is for a bicycle.
Basically, if Idaho stops are good for bikes, they’re even better for cars. If they’re legal for bikes, they should be equally legal for cars. But the study is flawed, and before we legalize rolling stops or drive-through-red legal, we’d need far more, and better, studies.
As an aside, we now know that you’re going to burn about the same calories whether exercising or not. Calories not burnt in exercise get used by the body to produce fat and to overdrive expensive biological processes, contributing to disease. The difference in total energy consumed through reduced food intake by legalizing rolling stops is negligible; it’d have almost zero environmental impact.
That’s a lot of words to say, “I don’t want someone on a bicycle to get something that makes their life a little easier. In fact, cars should get it and not bikes!”
Oh sweet, I didn’t realise a 8 thousand pound truck was self propelled. Exactly the same thing, for sure.
It takes less fuel to keep it going than to start it going. What point are you even trying to make?
That they are mad.
That the amount of effort it takes to move a bicycle is more than a motor vehicle?
The study found that cyclists preferred the Idaho stop method (which is pretty obvious for a vehicle that works largely by maintaining momentum), but also that when drivers received an education about the rolling stop sign law for cyclists, they approached intersections slower than before and created fewer dangerous scenarios for the cyclists.
So the only way it worked was in a closed study where all the drivers were warned cyclists would blow they stop signs without stopping…
Did they even wait a day after telling them? Or did they tell them that, run the experiment, and then claim it’s safer for cyclists to ignore traffic laws?
Even if there’s a short term increase, it won’t take long for drivers to forget that cyclists aren’t going to obey traffic laws.
Is the criticism that they told drivers about how the Idaho stop worked? If the Idaho stop was going to be more widely adopted, it’s a reasonable assumption that there would be a public education campaign so people knew what to expect.
Either way though, it’s a study meant to test a hypothesis and the outcome suggested that Idaho’s approach may be a good one.
If you’re wanting an admission that the study’s results may not hold up under further testing, sure. Admitted. But the study as a first step is pretty reasonable.
Is the criticism that they told drivers about how the Idaho stop worked? If the Idaho stop was going to be more widely adopted, it’s a reasonable assumption that there would be a public education campaign so people knew what to expect.
And that will never get out to everyone…
And while they may remember, how long will they?
Couple days? Couple months?
How long do you think a 60 year old will remember and pay attention to it over 45 years of driving experience?
But the study as a first step is pretty reasonable.
It’s not if the only way it worked was immediately before the test saying “cyclists won’t obey traffic laws”.
Like, there’d have to be an automated message that plays every single time you start a vehicle for this to be applicable…
It’s a traffic law, you can teach it just like any other. It gets added to driving school’s curricula and must be demonstrated in driving tests. You could communicate this law to existing drivers by removing the stop line from bike lanes and putting little bike yield signs, if the intersection warrants it.
Anything to avoid personal accountability I guess…
I’ve noticed that’s a huge trend in this sub, and honestly I should have just blocked it long ago
What are you even talking about?
It’s your personal responsibility as a driver to know and obey all traffic laws, even if they change it so that cyclists don’t have to physically stop at stop signs.
Stop signs in general aren’t the best solution. So long as we have them though, a rolling stop is the way to go when on two wheels.
They are way overused in northamerica - just pick a priority road and make the other one give way! Or use a mini roundabout.
Here, stop signs are rare enough that they indicate an unusually dangerous location, so you know to be careful.
deleted by creator
Why do so many drivers get pissy when cyclists do an Idaho stop? Is it just the lizard-brained “I have to stop so you should too” mentality?
I live in a state where it’s legal, and I have only ever done it when it’s completely safe and logical to do, and yet I’ve had two incidents where drivers (one in a car and one on a motorcycle) screamed at me and literally tried to run me off the road with their vehicles.
I’ve also had a couple incidents where I’ve been fully stopped at a light where I could have done an Idaho stop, and drivers have said something along the lines of “Thanks for stopping. You’re one of the few cyclists who actually stop,” which draws a fake smile and an eye-roll from me.
Edit: Downvoted for sharing my experience and following the law. Cool cool cool.
Undoubtedly it is in fact that lizard brain response. We like to think we’re above that but we’re barely better than the rest of the animals sometimes.
we’re all just monkeys, man.
We like to think that having technology and access to all this information makes us superior, but we’re all just lizard brain monkeys no further divorced from our violent and chaotic past than that of our simian ancestors. Put a group of people in a room, then single someone out, and watch the mob work.
We’re all just fuckin’ monkeys, man.
It is because of the number of cyclists who pull in front of traffic when they should have stopped, leading to short braking and getting flipped off by the cyclist for some reason. It is as annoying as pedestrians walking out into traffic (not at cross walks or in residential neighborhoods) when there are structured places for them to cross. It is as annoying as a csr pulling through a crosswalk when they shouldn’t.
Even if the overall system is terribly designed, having people create a hazardous situation is annoying.
Anyone who cares that a bicyclist that runs a stop sign or people jaywalk when there is no traffic around is getting their feathers ruffled over nothing. But there are just enough people who walk or ride into traffic when they should be yielding to make it an annoyance.
I can only speak from my own experience, but I’ve been cut off by cyclists (when I had the green light and they had a red) multiple times. A small handful of those I almost had to floor my brakes. Once there was a child on the back of the bicycle
I hold a significant amount of hatred for that parent. I could have killed that child due ONLY to the parents negligence
Why do so many drivers get pissy when cyclists do an Idaho stop?
Because it’s against the law and also creates a road hazard for everyone sharing the road. Idk about you, but I highly prefer safety over convenience.
OOOOK… I clearly stated that it’s legal where I live, and I only do it when it’s completely safe, and yet I’ve nearly been murdered by entitled drivers for doing so.
Also, the article linked in this very thread says that Idaho stops increase safety when all parties are aware of the law.
legal where I live
That’s nice for you, the other 98% of drivers have never even heard of an Idaho stop.
That’s where the danger comes from, a novel way to use a stop sign that is not common practice, ie people don’t expect it causing hazards 🤷
Wrong on both counts amigo. Please read more before chiming in next time.
It’s already been pointed out that it’s legal in many areas, but the article links to a number of research papers that disprove the idea that it’s more dangerous.
Possibly wrong on one account amigo. What if it’s illegal in his area and that is what he is resounding based on?
Someone asked why do drivers get pissy? Then this side responds with why he gets pissy and you assume he is wrong about everything. So for someone that toutes research papers and evidence, maybe ask if it’s legal in their area instead of talking down to them.
We’re clearly discussing situations where it is legal, as confirmed by the OP in this chain.
If they were switching to the separate topic of areas where it’s not legal then that’s extremely misleading without clarification. But we both know it’s just that they wanted to express their entitled opinions without even bothering to understand the context of the conversation.
Lol you’re so full of yourself.
We all SHARE the road, my opinion isn’t moot because we use stop signs properly in my city.
I’m not gonna make you use a stop sign properly, I’m not gonna wince when you get crushed under a bus either.
Hope the bus driver is aware of the law, I mean you’d hope a professional driver where they often have bike racks on the front would be aware of such a law.
So using stop signs “properly” to you means in a way that is proven more dangerous to cyclists? Yes I’m sure “sharing” is extremely important to you!
By the way I do stop at stop signs but my behavior has nothing to do with advocating for better and safer policies.
I’m all for an Idaho stop at a stop sign if and only if there is no other traffic. Otherwise they should respect priority.
Frankly, if there’s other traffic, you’re a dumbass if you rely on drivers to see and respect your right-of-way as a cyclist. Being in the right and dead is still dead.
I slow roll stop signs. I don’t do that at lights, but I will stop and then run the light if there’s no one around. I’m not riding on the sidewalk, so I can’t reach the button, and frequently the bike doesn’t trigger the signal.
Isn’t that what “treating it as a yield sign” means? Only difference being no forced stop for cyclists. If there is traffic with a higher priority, you do stop at a yield sign.
Pedestrians don’t have to stop at stop signs.
Walk the bike across 🤷
Just so you know, I’m gonna go for a bike ride later and blow multiple stop signs and red lights.
Just stick in give way signs, bish bash bosh.
