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Comment by RandomInteger4 | Hacker News Reader

To all those commenting about "Whoa is me, the dastardly cyclists are running red lights and stop signs", please look up the concept of an Idaho Stop.

Stop pretending that you're seeing these cyclists performing an Idaho stop during busy traffic. You know full well they're paying attention a whole hell of a lot more than you considering their life is on the line. You may not see us looking both ways, because it only takes about 15 degrees of head movement to allow our eyes to capture the full peripheral to check for oncoming traffic and it's a hell of a lot more convenient for the drivers behind us to have some distance between us.

The only reason this is a big deal is because humans are barely different from monkeys on an emotional level and can't rational handle the concept of there being a different legal context for a bike vs. a motor vehicle.

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I know about Idaho stop, but unless Idaho stop makes its way to the official Rules of the Road of the respective state, province, or country, and its knowledge gets verified at driver's test, it is irrelevant.

In the province I live in, there is no "Idaho stop". Rules are unambiguous: if you are on the road, whatever you are driving, you STOP at the stop sign. No guessing "do I/they do Idaho stop or not".

The whole notion of treating bicycles as vehicular traffic was wayward and has been debunked. It's really obvious that bicycles are not cars, you can tell just by looking at them.

There are differing levels of enforcement in different places, but I've made thousands, possibly tens of thousands of infractions on my bike in 35 years of commuting, sometimes right in front of the police, and I've never had a ticket. Is a rule really a rule if it isn't enforced?

If I say everyone needs to wear clown shoes to work on Wednesdays, is that a rule? It doesn't mean jack-shit because I can't enforce it.

Drivers are held more carefully to the rules of the road, but given that they're ensconced in a protective metal shell, they have a lot more leeway with the law of the jungle. With cyclists it's the other way around.

> The whole notion of treating bicycles as vehicular traffic was wayward and has been debunked

When, and by who?

According to the laws of New York State, bicycles are vehicles. They are required to follow the laws and traffic patterns, not make their own.

This is a reasonable post undermined by a ridiculous last sentence. Cyclists need to obey laws but those laws should not be the same as for cars because the impacts those laws seek to prevent are not the same.

I phrased the last sentence poorly. I've changed it.

> The whole notion of treating bicycles as vehicular traffic was wayward and has been debunked. It's really obvious that bicycles are not cars, you can tell just by looking at them.

The same as with Idaho stop, it does not matter. Looking at something that approaches the intersection, do I have to think what that is? What if it is a bicycle with electric assist? Moped? Scooter? Is it electric? Is it with ICE? Something in between the moped and the bike? Where do I draw the line? That is way more thinking than just following the rules of all-way stop/or main road/yield.

> There are differing levels of enforcement in different places, but I've made thousands, possibly tens of thousands of infractions on my bike in 35 years of commuting, sometimes right in front of the police, and I've never had a ticket. Is a rule really a rule if it isn't enforced?

Rules are there for your benefit, not police's.

> Drivers have to obey the rules of the road. Cyclists only have to obey the law of the jungle.

This quote right there pretty much explains why there is so much anger towards cyclists

The rules are definitely not there for my benefit, the bearing they have on my safety is incidental. I've got more important things to look out for than the traffic signs. The roads were designed for cars and any attention given to cyclists, the rules they shod obey, or design features to accomodate them is largely an afterthought.

It really doesn't matter how cyclists behave, the anger will still be there, because cyclists are part of the wrong tribe, their presence on the roads in any capacity is viewed as a violation of the natural moral order.

When I'm cycling, whether or not I'm obeying the rules has little material effect on a driver's ability to get from A to B, I'm courteous, but their blood pressure still goes up. My advice to them is to see a doctor and get it fixed.

I'd argue that even that's insufficient. Educational campaigns are hugely important as no one ever retakes a driver's test. There are frequent confrontations over entirely legal traffic movements because some people just don't know. And I'm not talking about recent bike safety laws either.

A compounding factor is that while rules for cars are more or less standard throughout the 50 states, rules for bikes are a complete mess. For example, in Massachusetts, a bike can ride in the left lane (I mean, you should probably have a good reason but it's 100% legal) where as in some other states, bikes have a mandated max distance from the right hand curb. How can anyone know what is actually allowed?

And a solution to the disjoint sets of laws is that states are very different. Super urban areas necessarily need different laws than very rural areas. Even regional snow fall amounts is a factor as bike lanes basically disappear in the winter.

I agree that rules alone are not sufficient, but it is a start. You can have an educational campaign to introduce, say, Idaho stop as the law, but educational campaign to follow Idaho stop before it is the law is confusing at best and breaking the law at worst.

FWIW, as a cyclist I would love to see Idaho stop legislated. As a driver, I do not follow stop rules blindly. If approaching all-way stop a see a cyclist (or anyone) close enough to the intersection without any signs of the slowdown, of course I will let them cross first. But even with the Idaho stop legislated many cyclists misunderstand it. For example, Idaho stop means treating stop sign as a yield sign, which means if you can safely cross the intersection without impeding anyone else (e.g. if there is no one else around or they are far enough from the intersection), you do not have to stop. It does not mean "I don't have to stop and have priority over cars no matter what".

That is exactly the point of making something the law instead of informal rule - there should be no ambiguity.

There's evidence practicing the Idaho stop makes cyclists safer, even in regions where it isn't legal. If that's true, IMO cyclists should bike in the safer fashion regardless of the rules.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-bike-st...

It is very limiting to believe that "rules are unabiguous" and should be followed to the letter. Rules are often (partly) wrong, not completely adapted to a situation, etc. Let's remember that "rules" used to make homosexuality worthy of a prison sentence, drinking alcohol was sometimes illegal too.

Well, there’s NO different context, at least in some places. In Montreal, which is a very bike-friendly city, you can get a ticket for running a stop or using headphones. I was recently stopped for this, by literally an ambush cop on a bike bath. Luckily got away with a warning. But I’ve heard others getting tickets.

I mean, we have lots of traffic laws, some not so well thought out, others enforced capriciously, others not at all, and so on. I suppose we might as well just unofficially adopt the Idaho stop outside Idaho and to hell with other States' laws...

More seriously, I think the Idaho stop is a good idea. Cyclists won't stop unless they really have to for reasons fairly obvious to anyone who has ever biked on streets. No need to make that behavior illegal. But it will require a bit of an education campaign. And we already have a ton of things that require mass education: zipper merges, yield the left lane to passers, and so much else.

Should NYS allow bikes to make right turns on red too while we're at it?

If a car rolls through a stop sign they're being an asshole who thinks they know more than the people who made the laws and have little respect for anyone around them.

The same is true of bicyclists who do the same.

I have never driven a car in my life (age 35 currently) despite growing up in a very rural area. Now I live in a city and bike everywhere and NEVER run a stop sign. The behavior of both drivers and bicyclists is embarrassing.

Well, then, that makes a metric ton of drivers assholes. There used to be this common claim in SF that stop sign rolling is a cyclist thing. Then Stanley Roberts sat at a stop sign and found nearly every car rolling it. Got it all on video too.

> that makes a metric ton of drivers assholes

Yes, this is true.

>If a car rolls through a stop sign they're being an asshole

Meh, it really depends on the type of stop and conditions.

Regardless of the number of wheels one's preferred mode of transportation has I'm not gonna complain about people doing rolling stops at 4-way stops where there's good visibility and the traffic conditions are such that there's no possibility of misinterpreting who's turn it is or at a right turn that would be a yield instead of a stop were there not a left turn option.

> Meh, it really depends on the type of stop and conditions.

I disagree. A stop sign is a stop sign. Otherwise the sign would say use-your-judgment-and-decide-what-to-do.

Traffic laws are written in a way that makes them as resilient as possible toward idiots. We require a full stop because not everybody has good judgement.

Yeah and the people who think they have good judgement often have the worst judgement.

> Otherwise the sign would say use-your-judgment-and-decide-what-to-do.

Huge numbers of stop signs are found in North America, but they're not so common elsewhere. In Europe, most smaller junctions in residential areas will have a "yield" sign, or no sign at all. Busier ones might have a mini-roundabout (give way to the left).

In the UK, installing a stop sign requires the permission of the central government. This is to keep the sign special — if you see one, there really is some risky road layout that means you can't see safely until you're stopped at the sign. There was only one example anywhere near where I grew up: next to an junction by an ancient castle where parts of the building overhung the road, meaning large vehicles might be on the wrong side of the road to pass by.

Absolutely false. You're mathematically safer when your speed is at parity with the other drivers on the road, and stopping unnecessarily interrupts your momentum to the point of drastically reducing your average speed over the course of a given distance traveled, increasing the chances that you'll get more severely injured during the journey.

If a car is travelling at 35 mph and you're traveling at 25 mph, then the relative speed of the car is 10 mph.

If a car is travelling at 35 mph and you're travelling at 10 mph, then the relative speed of the car is 25 mph, which is going to hurt a hell of a lot more than being hit by a car travelling 10 mph relative to you.

I'm a cyclist who doesn't think I'm too good to follow the rules of the road, and I can't tell you how much I love having to pass the same cyclist over and over in my car because they're doing Idaho stops.

What they are frequently not watching for, though, is pedestrians.

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