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Comment by arthurdenture | Hacker News Reader

> Gently rolling a stop sign at a high-visibility intersection sounds like a safe and principled violation.

If you do this yourself, please reconsider. My experience is that drivers who do this (especially at 2-way stops) are watching carefully for perpendicular traffic while blithely ignoring pedestrians approaching the crosswalk that they are rolling through. As a pedestrian, I consider this the second highest threat to my personal life+limb, after left turners who (again) watch for cars and not pedestrians.

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Yes! Drivers often seem to only care about the possibility of colliding with another vehicle. So by default they pull right through the crosswalk and/or stop line in order to maximize their visibility of cross traffic and maximize their speed of making the turn without hitting another vehicle. Their actions are both selfish and passive aggressive toward pedestrians, yet at the same time their actions are also completely _rational_ when the driver is ignorant of (or lacks empathy for) pedestrians. They get away with it because it's such a small violation of the law and because pedestrians take on the responsibility of not getting hit.

Yup. If you want to make roads safer for non-drivers, make design choices that make drivers feel more threatened. Turn one-way avenues into two-way streets with street parking, etc.

I see so many entitled, selfish pedestrians downtown, every day it's not even funny. People keep acting like drivers are the only people causing problems, but if pedestrians would quit crossing after the DO NOT WALK, a ton of collisions would be avoided there too. Pedestrians forget to check for, or blatantly ignore cars all the time. I can't count the amount of times I've avoided hitting some pedestrian, because I had to take the responsibility to look out for them.

If cars teach us anything it is that having a massive sense of entitlement is an effective strategy for promoting your own interests. That is why cars are treated with priority in so many places and can delegate responsibility for safety onto other users.

If you introduce the danger then you should take responsibility for safety.

The law puts most of the burden on drivers quite intentionally, and I think properly. My general impression is that the average driver doesn't understand the law and don't appreciate the extent to which it is designed to favor pedestrians.

To give one example, drivers are required to yield to pedestrians in cross walks and to pedestrians approaching crosswalks while pedestrians are only required to "exercise due care," which is a much weaker requirement. If you want to see how weak this requirement really is, look at the case law. In many cases in which the average driver thinks the pedestrian is in the wrong, the law disagrees and would place the lion's share of blame on the driver.

> To give one example, drivers are required to yield to pedestrians in cross walks and to pedestrians approaching crosswalks

Is that actually the case? I know that the former is true, but I haven't come across a law stating that drivers are required to yield to pedestrians who are not already in a crosswalk. Does case law differ from the text of the law it refers to?

> while pedestrians are only required to "exercise due care," which is a much weaker requirement. If you want to see how weak this requirement really is, look at the case law. In many cases in which the average driver thinks the pedestrian is in the wrong, the law disagrees and would place the lion's share of blame on the driver.

I would be curious about what case law would say about a collision like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=io_XBK0twtQ. Specifically, who would be found at fault/liable.

Nobody's acting like drivers are the only people causing problems. However, drivers seem unique in their ability to feel that they're doing everyone else a favor by allowing them to cross THEIR roadways.

Heavier, faster-moving vehicles are typically expected to yield to slower ones, whether on the roads or on the local multi-use path, because they're the ones likely to cause the most damage when a collision occurs.

Fair enough.

I did this when I lived in a rural setting and there were no sidewalks or crosswalks. In that case, I'm talking about rolling stop signs at entirely-empty intersections, where you can see that there are no cars or people around. At that point, I'm not sure I feel so bad about it - seeing a person at all is an adequate cue to drive differently.

I don't anymore, though, because I live in a city. Noticing everyone and working out their intentions means actually stopping.

Which, I suppose, is the sort of difference we might get between a self-driving car and a responsible human driver; the car isn't likely to treat stop signs contextually.

The presence of a stop sign is usually the result of a determination based on either engineering principles or (often fatal) experience that the intersection does not provide adequate conditions to be safely rolled, whereas if no such determination were made, either an uncontrolled intersection or Yield would be present instead.

It's true that a self-driving car will likely not be designed to substitute it's judgement for those of the authorities placing signage, though I'm not convinced that this is a bad thing for safety, or that the predilection of some human drivers to disregard such signage is a good, or even harmless, thing.

> The presence of a stop sign is usually the result of a determination based on either engineering principles or (often fatal) experience that the intersection does not provide adequate conditions to be safely rolled

A lot of times, they will be placed as a form of speed control. The MUTCD has requirements regarding the use of stop signs, but they don't appear to be followed most of the time. Otherwise, we wouldn't have nearly as many stop signs at intersections where there is plenty of visibility of cross traffic.

Of the two parts pertaining to complying with a stop sign (first stop, then yield), the second is far more important than the first when it comes to avoiding a collision. You can certainly come to a full stop and subsequently fail to yield and then collide with a pedestrian or vehicle. But even if you don't come to a full stop and do yield to a pedestrian or vehicle that has the right-of-way, you're not going to collide with them.

> A lot of times, they will be placed as a form of speed control.

An interesting thought: what's the lowest speed limit sign you've ever seen?

I've seen 5 MPH in parking lots, but never on an actual road. For official road signs, I virtually never see anything below 15 MPH. I'd be pretty surprised if this was actually the ideal driving outcome. There has to be some intersection at which 5 MPH and a yield sign is the ideal arrangement.

But given how traffic laws are enforced, and how people tend to ignore low speed limits, it's not a very practical arrangement. Instead, stop signs go in everywhere that very low speed limits are required.

(I'm still vaguely wondering whether a lot of people in this thread have ever driven somewhere very rural. Gently rolling a stop sign at an intersection with a mile of visibility and no one else around is not some wild risk.)

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