The video is convincing when it emphasizes the safety factors involved in a rolling stop, but less so when it emphasizes efficiency, which it emphasizes heavily. (And I say this as a regular bike commuter who certainly wants to conserve as much energy during my ride as possible.)

Technically, it is more energy efficient for an automobile to slow down and roll through an intersection if it is safe to do so, since frequent stops and starts is a good way to waste fuel. But no one would stand for a new law allowing cars the discretion to do this, even in situations where there is no cross or oncoming traffic. (This, despite measures across the country to conserve gas.) I’m afraid that telling drivers, “It’s more efficient for me to treat Stop signs as Yield signs,” would result in a whole lot of responses along the lines of “So what? Eat an extra banana.”

The cause would be better served it it emphasized the SAFETY reasons for the rolling stop. It can be dangerous for a rider to cross an intersection, and if he has to do it from a dead standstill it can be even more dangerous, as he sacrifices the short amount of time he might have to make it across safely. Cars obviously don’t have this problem, as a quick press on the pedal revs them up to 60 mph in no time. Additionally, if a rider rolls through a stop when it’s safe to do so, he gets out of the way of the larger number of drivers who often converge on an intersection. (Compared with the fewer drivers with whom he might simply share a long stretch of road.)

Convince drivers that a rolling stop is safer than the alternative and you’ve got a real shot at changing minds. But arguing that it should be allowed because it’s more energy efficient is a semantic argument that sets riders and alternative transportation policy makers up for failure, despite Idaho’s success.

Andy, the point doug was making is how the debate is framed. Instead of saying that rolling stops should be allowed because it is easier for us cyclists, say that they should be allowed because they are safer for you motorists.

get it?

In my mind the most convincing argument is from experience, both as a driver and a biker. If you are a good driver and you are at a 4-way stop with a bike, you simply can’t trust they are going to yield to you. They probably will yield if you go into the intersection, but if one time out of a hundred you hit the biker (even if it might be “their fault”) you aren’t going to go into that intersection until you know how the biker is going to behave. Most drivers behave this way.

So, as a biker, what do you do? You can come to a complete stop. In my experience you have to be 100% stopped before the driver will take the right of way. Then, waiting for the car to go through, you re-mount your bicycle and go through yourself. This sounds like the “right” way for things to happen, but in fact everyone waits a lot longer, the biker puts in way more energy, and if there are multiple cars or you are coming into the intersection at the same time as a car (i.e., you aren’t in conflict) then it actually can become far more confusing. What if you stop and dismount, and the car alongside you takes the right of way? What if you go together and the car alongside you turns, maybe into your path? What if the driver who is crossing wants to be nice, and encourages you to go first? It’s a mess, and this happens more often than not. Unless there’s no opposing traffic at all, at which point the biker has stopped and dismounted for no reason, and expecting a biker to do that is just nonsense.

In contrast, when everyone engages actively with the intersection, and the biker is allowed to time their passage through the intersection wisely, and drivers and bikers can intelligently negotiate who goes through, it works fairly well. The Idaho stop just makes it clear that the sane way to negotiate intersections with bikes is also the legal way. Without that law, everyone just breaks the law.

Another aspect is that rolling stops are the only way a bike can efficiently go through residential streets with lots of stop signs. This is better for everyone: more pleasant for the biker, less contention on busy streets, less interaction with fast-moving traffic. If bikes took stop signs seriously, it would just put bikes onto streets that weren’t designed for biking and don’t work well, and would leave everyone feeling more pissed off.

I agree with Doug. More energy is wasted by cars coming to a complete stop than cyclists, it’s just measured in gasoline rather than corn flakes. If we’re going to argue “we should be allowed to use common sense and roll through clear visible stop signs to save energy” then the argument would apply at least equally to cars.

Another argument for Idaho stops:

In many places, stop signs are used to discourage autombile traffic on residential streets. Many of these routes would be good for bikes — naturally-occurring bicycle boulevards, you might say — but the stop signs also discourage bicycles; instead, they use arterial streets, where they will encounter very few stop signs.

In general, I think it’s good — both for bikers’ safety and motorists’ sanity — for bikes to take quieter, lower-stress routes when they are available. Idaho stops would make more of these routes available.

Christine, the answer to your question is “a lot”, in particular in the boroughs outside Manhattan.

but ian, even with rolling stops, you come to a complete stop if there are other vehicles around. even when i come to a complete stop, cars get really confused by me. obviously this is an issue of other bikers taking the right of way when it isn’t theirs to take, so codifying 4 way stops for cyclists would be nice. but it doesn’t affect the idea that if i am on a bicycle, at an interesection, going slowly, i should be able to assess whether there is anyone coming and stop or continue accordingly. which is to say, treating a stop sign as yield sign means i -will- come to a complete stop, if there is someone approaching the intersection from the perpendicular direction.

Why is the Idaho Stop the only piece of traffic law reform that Streetsblog thinks about? Talk about an agenda (and a debatable one at that). So it takes a little more energy to accelerate from a stop. Big deal. It will develop your muscles & burn some calories.

There are other traffic law reforms that are being pursued elsewhere that would benefit cyclists way more, but you don’t hear about them from Streetsblog:
-minimum safe passing distance laws;
-laws that explicitly give cyclists the right to full use of a narrow traffic lane (New York State has such a law, New York City is exempted from it).
-Eliminating discriminatory ‘mandatory use of bike lane’ laws. Despite what you may hear on streetsblog, not all cyclists want to use bike lanes, even if they are physically separated. And such laws are used to harass cyclists.

How about it streetsblog?