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Comment by babl-yc | Hacker News Reader

I drive and bike. It's more annoying on a bike to come to a complete stop.

> I drive and bike. It's more annoying on a bike to come to a complete stop.

That's a side effect of your choice, not an excuse to blow through stop signs.

It's also a side effect of very bad urban design. I bike in the Netherlands and don't know if I've _ever_ seen a stop sign here. Traffic signals, sure, but not stop signs.

Cities in Europe are much smaller and more compact than US cities. And while there's no stop sign, you still have to yield to traffic from your right if there's no sign whatsoever. And specifically, dutch cities tend to have winding narrow streets where you can't speed up too much.

Stop signs are put in places where I guess a yield sign proved to be dangerous to traffic?

True, but you're addressing some of the things I meant when I said US cities have very bad urban design.

The alternative isn't a yield sign, it's a redesigned intersection and likely a roundabout, or much smaller intersection, or similar.

If someone can't follow traffic laws, they shouldn't be on the road (regardless of mode of transportation)

I see quite a bit of cars not coming to a 3 second stop, they mostly roll at slow speed and never actually stop the vehicle completely.

Do you advocate for 70% of the drivers to be taken off the road?

The law is a complete stop in California, not a 3 second stop.

And yeah, anyone rolling through stop signs shouldn't be driving. In cities that actually enforce traffic laws, you can get your license suspended for it.

And since this is about (semi-) autonomous vehicles, in this case, lets not also forget the release of FSD that specifically allowed you to run stop signs.

So anyone who drives 1 mph over the speed limit shouldn’t be on the road?

There are laws and there are norms. The overlap is never exact.

The laws should overlap with the norms more.

It really bothers me that the laws don't reflect real life. It gives the authorities the ability to harass whoever they like for violating laws that are routinely ignored until a cop wants to start something. That's not okay.

Insisting that a bicycle needs to follow the same procedures as a 3000lb internal combustion engine driven vehicle is madness. The vast majority of car laws are completely inappropriate for bicycles. Bicycles are much smaller, go much slower, can stop much faster, etc.

Then ride in dedicated bike lanes, but don't make up excuses why you should break the laws just because they are inconvenient to you.

confine the bikes to the bike lanes, then don't build bike lanes (or build awful ones) and finally you'll be free of those pesky bikes! finally the cars will have the road all by themselves.

> don't make up excuses why you should break the laws just because they are inconvenient to you

I tend to agree, and obey the speed limit and come to a stop at stop signs when driving. I get passed by other drivers, sometimes dangerously, often illegally, several times a week.

I would have sympathy for driver complaints about cyclists who ignore inconvenient traffic laws if drivers were any more law-abiding.

If you want to drive faster, fine, change the speed limit. But don't just ignore laws you find inconvenient!

I get what you’re saying but as a cyclist totally disagree. The problem I see at least while I was in SF, cyclists generally believed since they were riding a bike, they had the right of way in all scenarios. I still have vivid memories of almost smoking a cyclist while on my motorcycle only for them to be mad at me when I tried to explain to them that zipping in between lines of cars will get them run over. If you are to mingle bicycle son the same roads as cars, they need to follow the same rules.

I find plenty of rules of the road annoying, whether I'm in a car, on a bicycle or pedestrian. This "Oh, well, it's annoying so we don't do that" is BS.

I used to yield at stop signs early on while cycling, but after I was hit by a car who ran a stop sign, I switched to coming to a complete stop at every stop sign, ensuring no cars were about to run their stop signs, then going. Self preservation is more important than maintaining a little bit of momentum.

A fun bonus for this method is it seems to annoy the cars behind you even more when you actually come to complete stops, even though all drivers complain that cyclists don’t stop at stop signs.

Very very few drivers respect speed limits to the T or the whole bunch "slow down when you do not see around" rules.

So, majority of drivers can stuff themselves when they suddenly demand absolute perfect compliance from non-drivers.

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