Traffic on Hwy 164 does not stop, Hwy 39 does stop. However Hwy 39 has yield lanes that can be used to enter 164 via a right turn, and only slowing down, and not coming to a complete stop.
A few years ago there was a lot of gas drilling in the area, and the trucks working the drilling sites would use the yield lanes - to turn left!
This made me pretty mad, until I thought about it for a while. In a big truck you would not be able to see traffic from both directions, so they used the yield lane to 'square up' to traffic.
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When you design your User Experience, consider the human. Humans slip up[0], momentarily forgetting to do the right thing.
If your design becomes dangerous due to a slip, it is the worst kind of design. You see this kind of design on older industrial equipment - for instance presses without safeguards. Managers back then would make the same comment you regularly see on articles like this: 'All you have to do is pay attention, and it's safe.'
This is, frankly, stupid. If all it takes for a system to become unsafe is a momentary lapse in judgement, then the system is unsafe.
Manufacturers learned this via lawsuits (both for in-plant and user injuries) and now there are strict safety standards.
In the case of this unsafe intersection, responsibility is diffuse - it is split between driver, cyclist, local government, and the original contractor.
In a controlled environment like a hospital or manufacturing plant, you can measure near-misses as proxies for dangerous events. At a rural intersection, who would measure near-misses? An individual cyclist may have a near-miss and comment on it to her friends; would any drivers ever hear about it? Would the government ever hear about it? Would anyone care?
0. https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/book/the-gloss...
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To improve your perception in situations like this, you can add two tools -
1. Always take your foot off the gas and cover the brake when going through intersections. This naturally slows you down a bit, and if there is an issue you are in position to stop.
2. Owl bob your head from time to time. It sounds stupid, but it moves you out of your blind spots, and also clears saccadic masking - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccadic_masking