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> Not saying its a bad idea, but I'm still struggling to see the full logic of it.

If you don't have to stop at an intersection, you get through the intersection much faster and are therefore in less danger. This is true for all vehicles but especially true of bicycles, which don't always accelerate as fast.

Here's a video demonstration https://youtu.be/42oQN7fy_eM?t=71

The video gives a great explanation and demonstration of the problem and solution. At first I was thinking "Now bicyclists are allowed to not follow the rules of the road?" After watching the video, it makes much more sense and I'm on board with it.

That link was very helpful, thank you. I should have expected it to be the excellent Not Just Bikes channel.

> For example, if you are a cyclist who has to stop at a red light and a car comes up that is turning right I know that sometimes creates a hairy situation if there is not a dedicated turn lane and the car might try to turn in front of you.

As a cyclist, in these scenarios I put my bike in the center of the lane ahead of the vehicle. That way there is zero uncertainty about who proceeds first.

Besides intersections, uncertainty between drivers and cyclists is the most dangerous thing to cyclists, IMO. Clear signaling and cycling behaviors that remove that uncertainty help a lot in my experience. (I'll even give vehicles hand signals when I cross intersections when _running_ just to make sure.) Eye contact is very important as well.

The bike lane that suddenly doubles as a right turn lane always makes me nervous, but having said that ... I haven't ever actually had an accident with one.

I get far more nervous at my area's predilection for putting the left-turn arrow and the pedestrian crosswalk cycle at the same time.

You seem to be incentivizing drivers to run over pedestrians.

What, where is this? That seems crazy to tell two people they have the right of way when their paths cross.

Here in Los Angeles they solved this problem by just never giving turning cars the right of way with a protected arrow. You just have to wait in the intersection until the light turns red and then turn.

>That seems crazy to tell two people they have the right of way when their paths cross.

This is common in Austin, especially downtown. Green light for turning + Pedestrian has a walk sign. It's dangerous, and people get hit all the time.

I've been hit four times on a bike, and every time it was by someone making a right turn into a busy road too focused on traffic to look for cyclists.

Luckily the speeds were low enough it was more of a bump every time, but still, enough to put me on the ground

There's a very pragmatic aspect to this that isn't being covered, but for me is the big one: lots of lights don't change until a large metalic object goes over the in-road sensor. Bikes don't really trigger them. So you have to run the red either way, now at least it's not ticketable if a cop on a bad day sees you do it (safely of course).

>For example, if you are a cyclist who has to stop at a red ligh

Just to be clear, this law does not change the requirement for bicyclists to stop at red lights. Red lights become stop signs, stop signs become yield signs.

But they don't have to remain at the stop light if it's clear, so it does change the circumstances. Now a cyclist can get through the intersection without having to wait for the signal to change if it's safe (a judgement call they make based on what they can see and know). This means they will be gone before the circumstance described in the part of the quote that you dropped:

> For example, if you are a cyclist who has to stop at a red light and a car comes up that is turning right I know that sometimes creates a hairy situation if there is not a dedicated turn lane and the car might try to turn in front of you. [emphasis added]

This will help to create or maintain separation between cars and bicycles at intersections (in theory).

> Not saying its a bad idea, but I'm still struggling to see the full logic of it.

You don't have to see the full logic of it! There's data collected and analyzed by people who have studied the problem!

I can't tell if this is meant in jest or seriously, please could you point to a source for your claim that there is data analyzed by people who've studied the problem? (Genuinely asking - I'd love to visualize the data).

And now I can't tell if you're joking. It's linked very prominently in the article. Here you go. https://www.bicyclecolorado.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/S...

It wasn’t overly tricky to find the link labeled “The data is clear” in the article.

IMO, this is the most dangerous mindset of the 21st century, so far.

Agreed.

Much more dangerous than ignoring established subject matter experts in favor of relying on one’s finely tuned intuition developed through years of computer programming.

You're advocating a form of feudalism, only the key differentiator is "expertise" rather than land ownership or the ability to field an army.

Any time somebody says something like "Trust us, plebs. We're the experts." I know I should, in fact, not trust that person.

Absolutely. Everyone should have the opportunity to try to understand. Advocacy for something else is no better than religion.

Because you're an expert on knowing who to trust?

I think it is simply, intersections are the most dangerous place for a cyclist to be.

This new law reduces the amount of time cyclists spend at an intersection.

I don't see how spending less time in an intersection guarantees better safety. Can it really only be about how long you're in an intersection and not what is done while you're there?

Isn't this like trying to make a dangerous aircraft seem safer by only flying it 100 mi at a time? The number of successful flights would skyrocket while the baseline crash count stays about the same.

> Can it really only be about how long you're in an intersection and not what is done while you're there?

Empirically, it certainly seems to be the case; the fact sheet linked in the article references a couple of studies which demonstrate a correlation between adopting the "Idaho stop" and shockingly large reductions in cyclist injury.

> Isn't this like trying to make a dangerous aircraft seem safer by only flying it 100 mi at a time? The number of successful flights would skyrocket while the baseline crash count stays about the same.

You're sort of correct, except for the small detail that the total number of intersections traversed by cyclists is going to remain relatively constant--no one is going to start crossing more intersections because of this law. Thus, if you reduce the average amount of time spent traversing each individual intersection, you also reduce the total amount of time spent in intersections.

It depends on when the crashes happen. If your unsafe plane only crashes during takeoff and landing then you’d want to minimize those, if it only crashes at cruise you’d minimize that.

If crashes occur IN the intersection and not entering it, then reducing time IN is a net win, even if the number of insertions remain the same.

I do not see any logic here. They took a metric, in this case the location of accidents, and correlated it to a solution with no evidence that the solution (exiting the intersection as soon as possible) will actually improve things.

I could just as easily claim that the problem is what cyclists are doing in intersections, not the length of time they are there. There is more than one axis here. In my experience (I have lived in CO for 35 years) cyclists already assume that they do not need to stop and treat stop signs and some stop lights as yield signs. Does their data take into account if the cyclist in these accidents were actually following the letter of the law in the first place?