Not Just Bikes
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2022–2024
6:04 · 906K views · Jan 13, 2020
Not Just Bikes argues that stop signs are a poor traffic control, drawing on Dutch practice and the Idaho stop to show intersections can be safer without them, especially for cyclists.
Cited in threads about cyclist safety and traffic law as an explanation of why removing stop signs can improve safety.
5 comments from Hacker News
If there's that much traffic, a four way stop will be even worse than a roundabout. You'll need a turbo roundabout, traffic lights or grade separated intersections in that case. Four way stops are one of the dumbest inventions of man kind that are way over used in North America. Everyone has to stop all the time and it leads to scary situations at 2 way stops because people don't expect those anymore. Here is a great video about life without stop signs in the Netherlands: this video And here are some infinitely better alternatives: Low traffic + low speed: raised intersections where right goes first. Medium traffic + medium speed: priority road with yield signs on side streets and roundabouts High traffic + medium speed: traffic lights High traffic + high speed: grade separated intersections
It's counter-intuitive, but the data [0][1] is quite clear that laws like these significantly improve safety for bicyclists. I found this video [2] useful in understanding what might be going on. [0] [LINK] ("All reported injury crashes involving bicycles at stop sign controlled intersections dropped 23% in the 30 months after adopting the Safety Stop compared to 30 months prior to adoption") [1] [LINK] ("In year after adopting the “Idaho Stop,” crashes between bicyclists and motorists fell 14.5%, and Boise was 30-60% safer on a bicycle compared to similarly sized cities") [2] this video
> 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 this video
Everybody here is discussing the car and the cyclist, but I don't see anybody considering the possibility that the intersection design is unsafe. That there is a stop sign is a pretty bad signal in itself, Not Just Bikes made a video explaining this: this video
No, I think stop signs are a horrible design flaw that we have to live with, and rolling stops are the least bad way to work around that urban design flaw. It is asinine to force arbitrary stops at random intersections that have no time-of-day or traffic sensitivity (i.e. am I alone on the roads at 2AM, or are children walking to school at 8AM). Or to put them at intersections with clear cross visibility (what exactly is the stop for?). Or the 4-way stop sign mess. It is totally reasonable to require full stops in the latter case, but silly in the former. Unfortunately, stop signs make no distinction between the two. The only reason to fully stop at stop signs is actually the a pillar / b pillar blind spots, or obstructed view from the road. If you were hypothetically driving an open top car in an open neighborhood (or a motorcycle, bike, scooter, moped), there's no new "information" you'll gain by fully stopping rather than slowing down (where as if you have an A/B pillar blind spot, a full stop can give someone time to appear from behind it). See also: "Stop Signs suck and we should get rid of them" this video