Should bicyclists be allowed to treat stop signs as “yields” and stop lights like stop signs? Tomorrow, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission’s Bicycle working group will be pondering the question.
Idaho, recognizing the law of momentum is just as important as the vehicle traffic code, already adopted this practice back in 1982. And it’s working out fine, as guest writer Rachel Daigle pointed out in our special bike issue this year.
A piece in today’s Examiner highlighted naysaying from the Police Department about how this could increase accidents.
What if the exact opposite happened? What if changing the law to favor cyclists actually decreased accidents?
We all know most cyclists disregard the letter of the law because it’s really annoying to come to a full, unclipped stop at an empty intersection. Even Capt. Greg Corrales, chief of SFPD’s traffic company, was quoted in the Examiner saying, “There’s a small minority of bicyclists who actually obey the law.”
So let’s look at that. How difficult would it be – in fact, how difficult has it been – to break the will of cyclists? Clearly, ticketing cyclists doesn’t work – it’s a waste of strapped SFPD staff and resources and I’ll be the first to testify that my ticket for blowing through a stop sign only created a lot of resentment.
As it stands now, every intersection where a bike meets a car is a free for all. No driver really knows how a cyclist is going to behave because there is such a range of compliance with the law,
Instead, what if it were understood that at an intersection a cyclist was expected to roll through the sign and stop at the light, then wouldn’t that improve things?
This isn’t a call to toss safety to the wind. I’m a cautious cyclist: I function under the premise that no one can see me and I’m in constant and imminent danger of being creamed by a car. I would argue most smart cyclists also follow that creed and should continue to if California law were changed.
To that end, anyone interested in this issue should attend the meeting tomorrow at 1pm, at the MetroCenter Claremont Conference Room.
This memo [PDF], from Sean Co to the commission, outlines some of the issues really well.