Why cyclists don't stop at stop signs and shouldn't have to

Stop signs in Toronto were designed to control cars, and don't work for bikes. Cities with balanced transportation systems don't have them.

via the Biking Lawyer

It is a truth universally acknowledged that every post about children getting killed in traffic must start with “the child darted into traffic,” and every post about people on bikes must conclude that “they blow through stop signs.” But it is never so simple.

Two weeks ago, the Toronto Police, while doing “stop-sign enforcement,” tackled a cyclist, causing a concussion and other injuries. the Police say, “This wasn’t a situation where officers set out to have a physical interaction with someone. Other cyclists who stopped that day received a verbal warning.” The cycling community is outraged, calling it excessive force.

Everyone else in the city is apparently thrilled, spending the last two weeks writing letters to the editor like “Everyone — including cyclists — must follow the rules of the road,” and Cyclists up in arms? Wrong. Kudos to Toronto police for doing their job. The common thread is, “donning a cycling helmet and using bike lanes is not permission to flaunt the law. We all share the road and are all responsible for following its rules. If someone thinks that the rules don’t apply to them, then chaos will ensue.”

The problem here is that the rules make no sense, particularly if you understand the purpose of stop signs in Toronto. I have written about this over the years and put this post together with bits and pieces from earlier posts, including this bit of history.

OK, I used a long lens to compress this a bit, but there are still signs every 266 feet.

About 40 years ago, residents on Toronto's Palmerston Avenue were complaining about cars racing up and down the street, using it to avoid the nearby busy arterial Bathurst Street. That part of Toronto is laid out with the streets predominantly east-west, and had two-way stops at the end of the streets meeting Palmerston. The local alderman, Ying Hope, a notorious pothole fixer, lobbied to put stop signs on the north-south Palmerston as well, to slow down traffic enough that perhaps drivers would not bother to use it and would stay on Bathurst. Traffic planners were appalled; two way stops worked perfectly well at regulating right of way, which was the purpose of signage. Four-way stops waste gas and might cause more accidents because the right-of-way is not as clear.

But the alderman got his way, and the street became known affectionately as the "Ying Hope Memorial Speedway." The cars stopped using it because stopping every 266 feet was a real pain, and slower than driving on the arterial. Soon, everyone wanted four-way stops to slow traffic in their neighbourhoods, and now, they are almost universal.

All the letters to the editor complain that cyclists are blowing through stop signs, and it feels natural to do so, because the fact of the matter is, those stop signs are there to regulate speed, not right of way; two-way stops actually do a better job of that. And bikes have a hard time beating the speed limit.

The stop signs worked; there are way fewer cars on Palmerston. But as Professor Joel Fajans and Melanie Curry noted in Why Bicyclists Hate Stop Signs, this actually makes them more attractive to cyclists. “These annoyances may induce drivers to choose faster routes without stop signs, leaving the stop-signed roads emptier for cyclists. Consequently, streets with many stop signs are safer for bicycle riders because they have less traffic.”

Fajans and Curry go on to examine the energy required for a cyclist to start from a dead stop, and it is significant.

“Accelerating from stops is strenuous, particularly since most cyclists feel a compulsion to regain their former speed quickly. They also have to pedal hard to get the bike moving forward fast enough to avoid falling down while rapidly upshifting to get back up to speed.”

On my own bike, for a full stop, I have to get off the seat to put my feet on the ground. Just last week, I fell because when a bike is not moving, it doesn’t stay upright, and I missed my footing. Of course, the last time I wrote about this. subject, the response in comments was:

“I am sorry, but this is CRAP. If cyclists want to be treated with the same respect on the road as every other vehicle - both by drivers and by legislators - they need to obey the traffic laws. Period.”

I am sorry, but for this issue, the law is an ass. This is not a legal problem but a design problem. Cyclists don't go through stop signs or ride the wrong way because they are evil law-breakers; neither are most drivers who go over the speed limit. Drivers do it because the roads are designed for cars to go fast, so they go fast. Cyclists go through stop signs because, in most cases, they are there to make cars slow down, not to stop bikes. An early Treehugger writer, Ruben Andersen, wrote about twenty years ago:

I learned in design school that The User is Always Right. It doesn't matter what you think you have designed, the user's behaviour tells you what your product or system actually IS.... A great example is how roads are designed for 70 km/h, but then signed for 30 km/h – and then we wag our fingers at the speeders. These drivers are behaving perfectly normally for the system. If you wanted people to drive 30 km/h, then YOU FAILED. The people are not broken, YOUR SYSTEM IS BROKEN.

In Copenhagen, I learned what happens when the infrastructure is designed to accommodate people on bikes. This photo shows something I have never thought had happened in the history of bicycles: they are stopping at a red light at a T-intersection with no pedestrians in sight. Why? because the laws are generally written in ways that make sense to them.

Photo: Chris Turner

In Copenhagen, there are bike highways where the lights are timed for the bikes, not the cars. There are no stop signs. The lights are not every couple of hundred feet like the ones ignored in New York City- they are far apart. There are footrests at the intersection, making it a relaxing stop. No wonder people are happy to do it.

In the end, bad infrastructure design leads to bad behaviour on bikes. A study carried out by the Danish government found that just 4.9% of cyclists broke road rules when they were riding on cycleways. This rose to 14% of cyclists when there was no cycling infrastructure present. (The study also found that 66% of motorists broke traffic laws, mostly speeding.)

Why is there such a pile-on, literally and figuratively, on cyclists? A study, Scofflaw bicycling: Illegal but rational, noted,

“Nearly everyone has jaywalked, rolled through a stop sign, or driven a few miles per hour over the speed limit, but most such offences face no legal consequences. Society also tends to see these relatively minor infractions that almost all people make—though they are unmistakably illegal—as normal and even rational. Bicyclists who break the law, however, seem to attract a higher level of scorn and scrutiny.”

Dufferin Street north of Lawrence and I am not riding my bike on that road

Sometimes, cyclists are jerks. If a cop tells me to stop, I am not going to ride around him. But as I noted earlier, this is a design problem, not a legal problem. I am not going to ride my bike in traffic on Dufferin Street at dusk with an empty sidewalk beside it; I am going to break the law and ride on that sidewalk. And I am sorry, I am not going to stop at stop signs when I can slow down and yield to pedestrians and cars.

As Johnson and Marshall note,

“Unlawful drivers and pedestrians tend to rationalize their behaviours as time saving; bicyclists similarly rationalize their illegal behaviours, but were more inclined to cite increasing their own personal safety and/or saving energy. Most bicyclists can generally be described as rational individuals trying to function safely and efficiently, given the context and norms of where they live and the transportation system put in front of them.”

The system in front of us is designed for cars, and the laws regulating it are designed for cars. Acknowledge and address that problem, and maybe there will be fewer complaints about people on bikes.