﻿If you pay attention to debates about urban cycling and bike infrastructure you’ve probably
seen that there’s a certain stereotype of cyclists as renegade rule-breakers who think they’re above
the law. One of the most common criticisms that you see is about cyclists not coming to
a complete stop at stop signs because, of course, the sign says stop, so you’re supposed to stop.
Obviously we’re not going to try to convince you that cyclists always stop at stop signs.
That’s clearly not true. The thing that people seem to be forgetting though is that this isn’t
something specific to cyclists, this is normal road behaviour. Drivers don’t usually come to a
complete stop at stop signs either, unless there’s someone in the intersection forcing them too.
At least, that’s always been our experience. To test this intuition, we went to three
intersections in Ottawa and counted how many cars come to a complete stop at the stop signs
over a 20 minute period. The results were... pretty much what we expected. Of the 233 total
cars that we counted, 55 came to a complete stop while 178 rolled on through, sometimes
faster and sometimes slower, but all without actually stopping as indicated on the stop sign.
But that’s arguably not the most useful comparison. In some of those cases the driver
stopped because there was someone else in the intersection and they couldn’t continue forward.
If we remove those cases and only look at the times that the driver had the choice, we can see
that drivers are four-to-five times more likely to roll through the stop sign than actually stop.
Given how common and apparently accepted it is for multi-ton vehicles with blind-spots and
fast acceleration to roll through stop signs, it’s difficult to take seriously the idea that
it’s imperative for cyclists to come to a complete stop at all stop signs. Cyclists have less speed,
less mass, less ability to accelerate, and their vehicle doesn’t obstruct their vision.
It makes no sense to apply a stricter standard to the mode of transport that poses much less threat.
That doesn’t mean that cyclists should be able to do anything they want in intersections. It’s still
possible for cyclists to be inattentive, go too fast, or jump their turn, and if a cyclist does
those things then they deserve criticism. We’d argue for the Idaho stop, which allows cyclists
to treat stop signs as yield signs, meaning that they can roll through the intersection if it’s
visibly clear, but if there’s someone else in the intersection they have to yield the right-of-way.
This would mean legalizing for cyclists what basically everyone does anyway.
That raises the question of whether rolling stops should be legalized for drivers too,
and actually there’s a good case to be made that drivers should have more opportunities to yield
instead of stop. It seems like North America tends to overuse stop signs just to slow down traffic,
when a better approach might be to slow down car traffic with actual traffic calming measures like
narrower streets and raised intersections and to save stop signs for places that really need them,
like where visibility is low. The UK seems to prefer yield signs and roundabouts over stop
signs in most cases so it’s not necessarily a crazy idea. It’s something to consider.
With that said though, there’s nothing wrong with allowing bikes more leeway than cars. It’s OK for
rules to apply differently to different road users according to their potential to cause damage.
There’s a reason that drivers have to get a license but pedestrians and cyclists don’t,
and there’s a reason why big trucks require a higher class of driver’s license and face
extra rules like highway-side weigh-ins, lower speed limits,
and the obligation to honk when prompted by children.
What’s really weird is when people give cars more leeway than bikes. Our extensive and
ground-breaking field research showed that the overwhelming majority of drivers don’t stop at
stop signs, and it seems pretty unlikely that those people scolding cyclists are all in the
small minority of drivers who do consistently follow the letter of the law at stop signs.
It seems that what’s happening here is that driving is just such an ingrained
part of our culture in North America that the frequent ways that drivers break the rules to
make their lives more convenient have just become so normalized that they barely even
register as breaking the rules, while when cyclists do the same thing it stands out
as rule-breaking and lawless because cyclists are still somewhat of an anomaly on our roads,
depending on the city and neighbourhood. It’s like how, on highways in much of Canada,
the actual flow of traffic if drivers have their way is 10 or 20 kilometres per hour over the speed
limit. This is technically breaking the law but it’s so common that most people barely even think
about it like that. Cyclists aren’t as common so they don’t necessarily get the same leeway,
or at least there’s not as much consensus yet on what’s acceptable for them.