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Comment by abstractbarista | Hacker News Reader

Sounds good to me, as long as cyclists follow the same rules drivers do. Just yesterday I had a cyclist blatantly roll a stop sign on a side street, entering the main road I was on. If I was an inattentive driver I would have creamed him! He even looked to the left, saw me, and just kept rolling through!

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I see car drivers roll stop signs every day, multiple times a day. Sounds like the cyclists are doing just as good of a job at following the rules.

Rolling a stop sign (regardless of how many wheels you have) can be perfectly safe or stupidly dangerous and requires discretion. I'm not going to fault anyone for doing it in the abstract.

But do you roll a stop sign when a car is literally about to slam in to you if you continue into the intersection? No. Yet that's what the guy did.

Sounds like the cyclist properly judged the danger for himself, and his judgement was correct, because he's still alive.

When riding a bicycle, you often choose to endanger your own life and break the law in order to be less of an obstacle to motorists -- motorists, who in turn, almost certainly curse under their breath about how you should just obey the rules. Aggro assholes are gonna be aggro assholes.

Heh it'll work until someone on their phone doesn't even see them. In my case, I had to swerve left of center while blaring the horn. The guy rolled the sign >15mph.

> his judgement was correct, because he's still alive.

That's faulty reasoning. His judgement could have been completely wrong, and he just got lucky this time.

> When riding a bicycle, you often choose to endanger your own life and break the law in order to be less of an obstacle to motorists

I don't. The only time I would choose to endanger my own life on my bike is if the alternative is endangering someone else's life.

Rolling a stop sign (slowly, if there's no one at the intersection) is safer on a bike than stopping. In SF the Board of Supervisors voted to make it legal, but the mayor vetoed it.

They're considering changing the law in my state along these lines -- to allow bikes to treat stop signs as yield signs. I'm ambivalent about it, personally.

However, in the story that abstractbarista tells, that bicyclist didn't even treat the stop sign as a yield.

The difference is that in the car all you do is press brake & gas, cycling requires some physical work to start up again.

I know it's breaking the law, and I don't usually do it, but when I cycle on a quiet residential street, I'm going to roll a stop sign. I know it's bad, but at that point I'm going home and I feel tired.

Yeah my rule of thumb while cycling is, if it's an empty street i'll slow down so i can scan the other 3 sides and if it's completely empty i'll roll the stop sign. If there is a car/pedestrian, i'll come to a complete stop.

I feel like I would be a lot more frightened of getting hit by cross traffic (with right-of-way) in the rare case where one mis-judges whether cross traffic exists. I've had enough close calls (or times when I mis-judged whether someone was going to blow a red light/stop sign) when driving a car that I feel like doing rolling stops on a bike is nearly suicidal.

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