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Cyclists and motorists need to stop demonizing each other. The problem is not with either of those groups, the problem is with indecisive, inconsistent enforcem

by zaccus 12y ago

Cyclists and motorists need to stop demonizing each other. The problem is not with either of those groups, the problem is with indecisive, inconsistent enforcement of the law. A cyclist knows that there is most likely no consequence for running a stop sign, so even if it is technically illegal, there's no incentive for them to stop. If motorists could get away with running stop signs just as easily, they would do the same. It's unreasonable to expect people to act contrary to their incentives. We need to agree on what the law is, and enforce it accordingly. Maybe it doesn't make sense for cyclists to obey the same set of traffic signals as motorists; if that is the case then we need to explicitly say so. This business where some people obey traffic signals and other don't needs to stop. That is the responsibility of city government and law enforcement.

revelation 12y ago
Obviously, we can't have perfect enforcement. So we need to focus on the next best: enforce the rules where it makes a difference. As this article abundandtly points out, the greatest cause for injury and death (you know, what we created traffic laws for) are cars. Hence, this is where enforcement needs to happen.
bryanlarsen 12y ago
According to the article, 80% of motorists and 95% of bicyclists do not come to a complete stop at stop signs. In Idaho, bicyclists are not required to stop at stop signs. The elephant in the room is speeding. Speeding is responsible for ~30% of all road fatalities, yet is universally condoned on American roads. Drivers do not understand how hypocritical they are when they complain about bicyclists disobeying road rules while they themselves are speeding.
- commandar 12y ago
  >In Idaho, bicyclists are not required to stop at stop signs. Which, personally, I think is completely reasonable. Constantly stopping and pushing off again adds a huge amount of effort to a ride, and a cyclist has plenty of incentive to look before rolling through an intersection.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
    - commandar 12y ago
      >We cross at those intersections, and bicyclists, in my experience, don't see us when they're focused on cutting a light (or a stop sign). Pedestrians crossing at a stop sign have to yield to vehicular traffic, no? And advocating the Idaho Stop isn't advocating for cyclists to blow through at full clip. Stop signs are treated as yields and have to be slowed for, and stop lights are treated as motor vehicles treat stop signs, requiring a full stop.
      - bbarn 12y ago
        Vehicles must yield to pedestrians in crosswalks in many states. Illinois is one of them, yet I find in practice anything without a stop sign you're as likely to get buzzed while someone lays on the horn as you are allowed to cross. I regularly have cars honking at me and trying to pass on the right when I stop at crosswalks on some streets in Chicago for pedestrians. It's as if I'm being a jerk for following the law instead of "the Chicago way"
        aidenn0 12y ago
        It is required to yield to pedestrians in clearly marked crosswalks in Virginia, and yet, when I visit my parents and assert my right-of-way at the nearest crosswalk, I have ~20% chance of being flipped off and 40% chance of being honked at.
  - adamtj 12y ago
    That argument works even better for cars. Cars are much heavier. It's far more effort to stop a car and get it going again than for a bicycle. It would dramatically improve gas mileage if cars could ignore stop signs.
    - derekp7 12y ago
- x2Opteron 12y ago
  Speeding is a tricky issue because of the wide variety of types of roads. For instance: four lane, divided highways yield fewer fatalities without any speed limits. (This is known as the 'Montana Paradox'). http://www.hwysafety.com/hwy_montana.htm http://www.hwysafety.com/hwy_montana.htm
  - bbarn 12y ago
    But then, isn't having an appropriate speed limit for the type and layout of the road still the issue? What makes it tricky, if we consider the safe speed on straight open 4 lane roads to be 90 and an urban street with frequent crossings to be 30?
- u801e 12y ago
  > Speeding is responsible for ~30% of all road fatalities That's not true. First, "speeding related" is not synonymous with "caused by speeding". Second, the data that relates to "speeding related" crashes has a significant overlap with "alcohol related crashes". If you exclude the "alcohol related" crashes from the total, you'll find that percentage drops quite a bit.
- john_b 12y ago
  The author of the original article misquotes the 30% statistic. According to the PDF he linked to [1], 30% of American motorist fatalities are "speeding related." This is not the same thing as "caused by speeding." According to the NHTSA, speeding in this context is defined as "Speeding is reported in the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) as a driver-level attribute that combines 'driving too fast for conditions' or 'in excess of posted speed limit.'" [2] Note that, in multi-vechicle accidents, only one party needs to have been speeding for the accident to be considered "speeding related". The 30% figure quoted also seems to vary quite a bit depending on the data you look at: "The percentage of all crashes that were speeding-related (DTFFC or EPSL) varied considerably among the States, from about 6 percent to about 20 percent of all crashes" (ibid) The NHTSA distinguishes between two types of speeding: 1) Exceeding Posted Speed Limit (EPSL) 2) Driving Too Fast For Conditions (DTFFC) The former simply occurs whenever one's speed is greater than the posted maximum. The latter is a subjective call by the police officer, etc investigating the case and factors in road, traffic, and weather conditions. The NHTSA has found (ibid) that about half of speeding-related fatal crashes occur for EPSL (55%) and the other half for DTFFC (45%). For speeding-related crashes that result in injuries, the respective ratios are 26% and 74% (ibid). The same source mentions that "The relative proportion of crashes that occurred on the curved sections of the road was much higher in speeding-related (DTFFC or EPSL) crashes" which suggests that many of these accidents were actually caused by either some form of driver inattention or adverse weather affecting road conditions, and that speeding was a contributing factor in the accident (i.e. less ability to correct for an unexpected event) but not the sole cause. Since driver inattention is almost impossible to prove absent records of an untimely text message or tweet, it's likely that the true causes of most of these accidents (most likely driver inattention or overly agressive driving) go unreported and are instead attributed to the only measurable data point that can be discerned: speeding. [1] http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/812006.pdf http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/812006.pdf [2] http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/811090.PDF http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/811090.PDF
InclinedPlane 12y ago
A huge percentage of motorists flaunt the law every single day. They fail to signal, they fail to yield when they're supposed to, they blow through red lights, they exceed the speed limit, they drink and drive. Sometimes these behaviors are so common that they acquire nicknames, like the "boston left". But we accept all this lawlessness as normal, as the fuzziness around the edges of lawfulness. Even though this sort of behavior is so common and so dangerous that it is responsible for the death of tens of thousands of people every year in the US alone and countless billions in economic losses in damages and injuries. In contrast to that, bicyclist lawlessness doesn't even rate. But bicycle lawlessness hasn't been folded into the accepted comfortable fuzzy border around lawfulness so every instance is a horrid and unique crime against the sanctity of the law and the foundations of civil society. Edit: both bicyclist and motorist lawlessness is problematic. But the existence of either does not somehow damn the entire population of bicyclists or motorists. There are good motorists and bad motorists as there are good cyclists and bad cyclists. As mentioned above, folks who rail against the universal lawlessness of cyclists are focusing on one of the least serious dangers on the road.
- nilkn 12y ago
  > A huge percentage of motorists flaunt the law every single day. They fail to signal, they fail to yield when they're supposed to, they blow through red lights, they exceed the speed limit, they drink and drive People complain about these infractions all the time. All the time. Just because something is "normal" doesn't mean people are happy with it.
  - InclinedPlane 12y ago
    People don't routinely use them as an excuse to vilify all drivers, but that pattern is quite common when it comes to cyclists.
    - nilkn 12y ago
      Drivers are routinely vilified in bulk in mostly any major American city. For most residents of a large city, it has almost become a pastime to remark on how bad all the drivers are and how their city just must have the worst drivers out of all cities.
afterburner 12y ago
Pedestrians don't need to stop at Stop signs either. I think it's safest for all concerned if drivers treat cyclists as pedestrians. Give them right of way all the time, don't expect them to act exactly like cars at intersections. If I see a cyclist approaching a 4-way stop that I've stopped at in my car, I wait until their intentions are clear. (Equally importantly, I don't get angry if they blow through the Stop sign.) Counting on the rules being blindly followed is not a winning strategy, as anyone who's read about or experience mixed used roads will know. EDIT: I wouldn't wait excessively long, of course, only if it were a close call, same as with a pedestrian. Common sense. Wow, apparently exercising common sense, being appropriately cautious, and not being angry at cyclists is downvote-worthy. It's all about the rules here I guess, despite many studies pointing out otherwise.
- u801e 12y ago
  > If I see a cyclist approaching a 4-way stop that I've stopped at in my car, I wait until their intentions are clear. As a cyclist, this is one of the more annoying things I have to deal with. In the example you mention, I would expect you to proceed before I actually reach the intersection. Now, instead of slowing down and then proceeding through the intersection (after you've gone), I have to come to a stop and wait for you to proceed before I can go.
  - dllthomas 12y ago
    Signal. Which is not to say that I wholly endorse the comment you were responding to, just that there is a good way you can make your intentions clear.
  - afterburner 12y ago
    Again, you're applying rules too strictly. If you (the cyclist) are far enough away that you can stop easily if I (the driver) were to proceed, then I'll proceed. Bottom line, use common sense. If it looks like a close call, I'll wait until it's not, just like I would with a pedestrian; I'm not going to wait from the pedestrian 10 seconds away to cross either. Surely you'd support that kind of common sense caution towards cyclists.
u801e 12y ago
> It's unreasonable to expect people to act contrary to their incentives. It's actually unreasonable to expect drivers or cyclists to obey traffic laws that have no sound basis. Many stop signs are in place because they're misused for speed control, or are installed in places where a yield sign would suffice, or they're in place at a T-intersection where it's plainly obvious that there's no traffic to yield to, and so on. What we really need is remove a lot of stop signs and replace them with yield signs. The only intersections where they should stay in place is where visibility of oncoming or cross traffic is limited.
e40 12y ago
I agree, but there's this other thing: I'm a pedestrian and in the crosswalk. A cyclist is speeding toward me and doesn't stop. They either swerve around me or make me jump out of their way. A woman was killed last year in SF when she was hit by a cyclist in the crosswalk (she had the right of way, not crossing against the light). So, even when there are consequences, cyclists act horribly.
- rpearl 12y ago
  I think all this illustrates is selective memory. You remember some cyclists swerving because that frightened you. You don't remember all the times the interaction went smoothly. The irresponsible cyclist who killed a woman is just that--irresponsible and reckless. This is orthogonal to the fact that he was on a bike at the time.
- wozniacki 12y ago
  Are you referring to this man who was killed by a cyclist last year, at Market and Castro or was there another incident where a woman was killed by a different cyclist? http://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Family-of-bicyclist-s-victim-didn-t-want-jail-time-4682335.php#photo-4949165 http://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Family-of-bicyclist-s-vi...
  - e40 12y ago
    Definitely different. This was a 22ish yr old woman. I don't remember the street.
- panarky 12y ago
  Let's not cite anecdotes to set public policy. You give one example of a pedestrian killed by a cyclist in SF last year. Also last year, 21 pedestrians and 4 cyclists were killed by cars[0]. That's still not a fair statistic because there are far more cars than bikes. So in 2012, 1.14 people were killed by cars in the US per 100 million miles driven[1]. I can't find similar bike stats for the US, but in the UK there are about 3.7 cyclist deaths per 100 million miles. How many of those deaths were caused by cyclists, and how many were caused by cars? [0] http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Streets-of-S-F-a-road-hazard-as-pedestrian-5205143.php http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Streets-of-S-F-a-road-... [1] http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/general-statistics/fatalityfacts/state-by-state-overview http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/general-statistics/fatalit... [2] http://www.ctc.org.uk/resources/ctc-cycling-statistics http://www.ctc.org.uk/resources/ctc-cycling-statistics

by zaccus 12y ago

revelation 12y ago

Obviously, we can't have perfect enforcement. So we need to focus on the next best: enforce the rules where it makes a difference. As this article abundandtly points out, the greatest cause for injury and death (you know, what we created traffic laws for) are cars. Hence, this is where enforcement needs to happen.

bryanlarsen 12y ago

According to the article, 80% of motorists and 95% of bicyclists do not come to a complete stop at stop signs. In Idaho, bicyclists are not required to stop at stop signs. The elephant in the room is speeding. Speeding is responsible for ~30% of all road fatalities, yet is universally condoned on American roads. Drivers do not understand how hypocritical they are when they complain about bicyclists disobeying road rules while they themselves are speeding.

commandar 12y ago
>In Idaho, bicyclists are not required to stop at stop signs. Which, personally, I think is completely reasonable. Constantly stopping and pushing off again adds a huge amount of effort to a ride, and a cyclist has plenty of incentive to look before rolling through an intersection.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
  - commandar 12y ago
    >We cross at those intersections, and bicyclists, in my experience, don't see us when they're focused on cutting a light (or a stop sign). Pedestrians crossing at a stop sign have to yield to vehicular traffic, no? And advocating the Idaho Stop isn't advocating for cyclists to blow through at full clip. Stop signs are treated as yields and have to be slowed for, and stop lights are treated as motor vehicles treat stop signs, requiring a full stop.
    - bbarn 12y ago
      Vehicles must yield to pedestrians in crosswalks in many states. Illinois is one of them, yet I find in practice anything without a stop sign you're as likely to get buzzed while someone lays on the horn as you are allowed to cross. I regularly have cars honking at me and trying to pass on the right when I stop at crosswalks on some streets in Chicago for pedestrians. It's as if I'm being a jerk for following the law instead of "the Chicago way"
      - aidenn0 12y ago
        It is required to yield to pedestrians in clearly marked crosswalks in Virginia, and yet, when I visit my parents and assert my right-of-way at the nearest crosswalk, I have ~20% chance of being flipped off and 40% chance of being honked at.
- adamtj 12y ago
  That argument works even better for cars. Cars are much heavier. It's far more effort to stop a car and get it going again than for a bicycle. It would dramatically improve gas mileage if cars could ignore stop signs.
  - derekp7 12y ago
x2Opteron 12y ago
Speeding is a tricky issue because of the wide variety of types of roads. For instance: four lane, divided highways yield fewer fatalities without any speed limits. (This is known as the 'Montana Paradox'). http://www.hwysafety.com/hwy_montana.htm http://www.hwysafety.com/hwy_montana.htm
- bbarn 12y ago
  But then, isn't having an appropriate speed limit for the type and layout of the road still the issue? What makes it tricky, if we consider the safe speed on straight open 4 lane roads to be 90 and an urban street with frequent crossings to be 30?
u801e 12y ago
> Speeding is responsible for ~30% of all road fatalities That's not true. First, "speeding related" is not synonymous with "caused by speeding". Second, the data that relates to "speeding related" crashes has a significant overlap with "alcohol related crashes". If you exclude the "alcohol related" crashes from the total, you'll find that percentage drops quite a bit.
john_b 12y ago
The author of the original article misquotes the 30% statistic. According to the PDF he linked to [1], 30% of American motorist fatalities are "speeding related." This is not the same thing as "caused by speeding." According to the NHTSA, speeding in this context is defined as "Speeding is reported in the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) as a driver-level attribute that combines 'driving too fast for conditions' or 'in excess of posted speed limit.'" [2] Note that, in multi-vechicle accidents, only one party needs to have been speeding for the accident to be considered "speeding related". The 30% figure quoted also seems to vary quite a bit depending on the data you look at: "The percentage of all crashes that were speeding-related (DTFFC or EPSL) varied considerably among the States, from about 6 percent to about 20 percent of all crashes" (ibid) The NHTSA distinguishes between two types of speeding: 1) Exceeding Posted Speed Limit (EPSL) 2) Driving Too Fast For Conditions (DTFFC) The former simply occurs whenever one's speed is greater than the posted maximum. The latter is a subjective call by the police officer, etc investigating the case and factors in road, traffic, and weather conditions. The NHTSA has found (ibid) that about half of speeding-related fatal crashes occur for EPSL (55%) and the other half for DTFFC (45%). For speeding-related crashes that result in injuries, the respective ratios are 26% and 74% (ibid). The same source mentions that "The relative proportion of crashes that occurred on the curved sections of the road was much higher in speeding-related (DTFFC or EPSL) crashes" which suggests that many of these accidents were actually caused by either some form of driver inattention or adverse weather affecting road conditions, and that speeding was a contributing factor in the accident (i.e. less ability to correct for an unexpected event) but not the sole cause. Since driver inattention is almost impossible to prove absent records of an untimely text message or tweet, it's likely that the true causes of most of these accidents (most likely driver inattention or overly agressive driving) go unreported and are instead attributed to the only measurable data point that can be discerned: speeding. [1] http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/812006.pdf http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/812006.pdf [2] http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/811090.PDF http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/811090.PDF

InclinedPlane 12y ago

A huge percentage of motorists flaunt the law every single day. They fail to signal, they fail to yield when they're supposed to, they blow through red lights, they exceed the speed limit, they drink and drive. Sometimes these behaviors are so common that they acquire nicknames, like the "boston left". But we accept all this lawlessness as normal, as the fuzziness around the edges of lawfulness. Even though this sort of behavior is so common and so dangerous that it is responsible for the death of tens of thousands of people every year in the US alone and countless billions in economic losses in damages and injuries. In contrast to that, bicyclist lawlessness doesn't even rate. But bicycle lawlessness hasn't been folded into the accepted comfortable fuzzy border around lawfulness so every instance is a horrid and unique crime against the sanctity of the law and the foundations of civil society. Edit: both bicyclist and motorist lawlessness is problematic. But the existence of either does not somehow damn the entire population of bicyclists or motorists. There are good motorists and bad motorists as there are good cyclists and bad cyclists. As mentioned above, folks who rail against the universal lawlessness of cyclists are focusing on one of the least serious dangers on the road.

nilkn 12y ago
> A huge percentage of motorists flaunt the law every single day. They fail to signal, they fail to yield when they're supposed to, they blow through red lights, they exceed the speed limit, they drink and drive People complain about these infractions all the time. All the time. Just because something is "normal" doesn't mean people are happy with it.
- InclinedPlane 12y ago
  People don't routinely use them as an excuse to vilify all drivers, but that pattern is quite common when it comes to cyclists.
  - nilkn 12y ago
    Drivers are routinely vilified in bulk in mostly any major American city. For most residents of a large city, it has almost become a pastime to remark on how bad all the drivers are and how their city just must have the worst drivers out of all cities.

afterburner 12y ago

Pedestrians don't need to stop at Stop signs either. I think it's safest for all concerned if drivers treat cyclists as pedestrians. Give them right of way all the time, don't expect them to act exactly like cars at intersections. If I see a cyclist approaching a 4-way stop that I've stopped at in my car, I wait until their intentions are clear. (Equally importantly, I don't get angry if they blow through the Stop sign.) Counting on the rules being blindly followed is not a winning strategy, as anyone who's read about or experience mixed used roads will know. EDIT: I wouldn't wait excessively long, of course, only if it were a close call, same as with a pedestrian. Common sense. Wow, apparently exercising common sense, being appropriately cautious, and not being angry at cyclists is downvote-worthy. It's all about the rules here I guess, despite many studies pointing out otherwise.

u801e 12y ago
> If I see a cyclist approaching a 4-way stop that I've stopped at in my car, I wait until their intentions are clear. As a cyclist, this is one of the more annoying things I have to deal with. In the example you mention, I would expect you to proceed before I actually reach the intersection. Now, instead of slowing down and then proceeding through the intersection (after you've gone), I have to come to a stop and wait for you to proceed before I can go.
- dllthomas 12y ago
  Signal. Which is not to say that I wholly endorse the comment you were responding to, just that there is a good way you can make your intentions clear.
- afterburner 12y ago
  Again, you're applying rules too strictly. If you (the cyclist) are far enough away that you can stop easily if I (the driver) were to proceed, then I'll proceed. Bottom line, use common sense. If it looks like a close call, I'll wait until it's not, just like I would with a pedestrian; I'm not going to wait from the pedestrian 10 seconds away to cross either. Surely you'd support that kind of common sense caution towards cyclists.

u801e 12y ago

> It's unreasonable to expect people to act contrary to their incentives. It's actually unreasonable to expect drivers or cyclists to obey traffic laws that have no sound basis. Many stop signs are in place because they're misused for speed control, or are installed in places where a yield sign would suffice, or they're in place at a T-intersection where it's plainly obvious that there's no traffic to yield to, and so on. What we really need is remove a lot of stop signs and replace them with yield signs. The only intersections where they should stay in place is where visibility of oncoming or cross traffic is limited.

e40 12y ago

I agree, but there's this other thing: I'm a pedestrian and in the crosswalk. A cyclist is speeding toward me and doesn't stop. They either swerve around me or make me jump out of their way. A woman was killed last year in SF when she was hit by a cyclist in the crosswalk (she had the right of way, not crossing against the light). So, even when there are consequences, cyclists act horribly.

rpearl 12y ago
I think all this illustrates is selective memory. You remember some cyclists swerving because that frightened you. You don't remember all the times the interaction went smoothly. The irresponsible cyclist who killed a woman is just that--irresponsible and reckless. This is orthogonal to the fact that he was on a bike at the time.
wozniacki 12y ago
Are you referring to this man who was killed by a cyclist last year, at Market and Castro or was there another incident where a woman was killed by a different cyclist? http://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Family-of-bicyclist-s-victim-didn-t-want-jail-time-4682335.php#photo-4949165 http://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Family-of-bicyclist-s-vi...
- e40 12y ago
  Definitely different. This was a 22ish yr old woman. I don't remember the street.
panarky 12y ago
Let's not cite anecdotes to set public policy. You give one example of a pedestrian killed by a cyclist in SF last year. Also last year, 21 pedestrians and 4 cyclists were killed by cars[0]. That's still not a fair statistic because there are far more cars than bikes. So in 2012, 1.14 people were killed by cars in the US per 100 million miles driven[1]. I can't find similar bike stats for the US, but in the UK there are about 3.7 cyclist deaths per 100 million miles. How many of those deaths were caused by cyclists, and how many were caused by cars? [0] http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Streets-of-S-F-a-road-hazard-as-pedestrian-5205143.php http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Streets-of-S-F-a-road-... [1] http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/general-statistics/fatalityfacts/state-by-state-overview http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/general-statistics/fatalit... [2] http://www.ctc.org.uk/resources/ctc-cycling-statistics http://www.ctc.org.uk/resources/ctc-cycling-statistics