in once lived in a place where they would do “crosswalk stings.” a person with a bright red jacket crosses the road at a crosswalk. and, any driver who doesn’t stop gets ticketed.
i’m all for the occasional safety policing, public awareness raising of things like that.
i was once driving and overly tired, went through a school-zone at full speed. i – and the continuing train of people getting pulled over that morning – totally deserved that ticket. i like to think the experience made me more aware.
ianabm but i always assumed it was because of parking. ( i will admit though i’ve lived in some places where my bike commute time almost exactly matched my car commute time. crazy numbers of cars, and many side-streets for bikes. )
You say you “ended up with the ticket because [you] were in the car”. I get that that was a traumatic event for you but it’s kind of a BS driveby. I personally know someone who was killed biking in an accident with a car and the driver was not charged with anything, probably correctly. Based on my following the issue I’m certainly not aware that car-vs-bike collisions would be expected to end with legal sanction for drivers AT ALL. Care to share any details? Like perhaps what you were ticketed with?
I think the ‘ask’ here is for something like the Idaho Stop law in San Francisco. Anyone from Idaho on here have experience with how that works? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idaho_stop
Don’t get me wrong: I hate that I hit and injured someone with my car. It’s terrible, and I wonder if there was something else I could have done. I could have just sat at the intersection and waited to see what the biker would do. That is, in fact, what I do now.
It was a long-ish time ago, and eventually boiled down to he-said, she-said on both of our cases. I came to an intersection, stopped, and drove into it. The bicyclist blew through the stop sign and ended up directly in front of my car. It was a relatively low-speed collision, but there was still a trip to the ER in an ambulance involved.
At the end of the day, metaphorically speaking, (and I never spoke to the bicyclist again, lawyers and stuff), I got a ticket because the bicyclist claimed she was already in the intersection. Third-party witnesses said otherwise and volunteered to testify, but the police officer on the scene elected to not ask for witness statements. I was ticketed for something minor - failing to yield the intersection leading to an accident, basically, and my insurance company told me that in cases like these the assumption is that the auto driver is at fault, and this was a generic enough ticket that it was pointless to fight it further.
Just to add to this FWIW the problem of not having a shared understanding of behavior and rules is a huge problem. I live in Seattle. I try to follow traffic rules on my bike to a degree that is probably greater than average and it is very difficult. For example the Burke Gilman bike trail has a shit ton of stop signs on it for cross traffic. Cars do not expect bikes to stop and if you do they will stop anyway and wait for you. Part of this is probably driver fear, part of it is people trying to be good-natured and part of it is the poor design of the roadways where a bike trail with lots of stop signs on sort of sucks in the general consensus.
This is not bike-only though. I routinely stop for pedestrians at crosswalks according to the law (one of the most important laws I think) and other cars and pedestrians go crazy. Cars swerve around me if they can, peds wave me on.
Sometimes I’m kind of a pedantic jerk about it I admit. I hate seeing a ped waiting at a crosswalk in the heat where they have the right of way so I stop. But if it’s one of our local 4-lane arterials then that’s obviously not enough. The ped doesn’t feel safe crossing the rest of the street anwway, they know the consensus law (enforced by the police) is that they DO NOT have the right of way and they should wait for a break in traffic. If it were me, I’d walk out in the middle of traffic waving my hands and flipping people off until they stopped, per the law to yield to pedestrians, but perhaps I hold my life cheap or more likely I simply place too much value on being “right”.
I once received a traffic ticket for not stopping at a stop sign while riding my bike. A couple years later, I was in a group ride and there was a cop nearby, and a stop sign right in front of me. I stopped. The person behind me on the ride ran into me.
Don’t people walk in SF, cyclist not heeding lights and stop signs do endanger pedestrians. Two days ago i was in a crosswalk when a cyclist narrowly missed me because I dared to assume he would stop at the red light. Also about passing, doesn’t SF have bike lanes? If they did cars and bikes can share the road if everyone follows the rules.
Around 5:30 p.m, a few riders ventured out into the street, stopped at the intersection, and patiently waited for their individual turn to cross. A car stuck behind them began honking, seemingly confused as to why cyclists weren’t riding through the intersection as the driver was accustomed to.
There’s just no way this paragraph isn’t attempting to weave a narrative unsupported by reality.
You’d first have to establish that you’d normally have so many cyclists riding single file like that, if there were, then while they’d be riding through the stop sign they’d just be stopping traffic trying to cross the intersection. Same difference.
Then you’d come up against a few tricky and unfortunate situations. If a car is already in the intersection and a cyclist zips in front of it, who’s at fault? You’ve got to establish who has the right of way.
I’m all for new rules that let bikes and cars coexist but having had a few close calls with more than a few cyclists I don’t see how you wouldn’t want them to at least look both ways before crossing the street. After all, like pedestrians, they’re the ones most likely to get hurt in an accident with a car.
I mean, yeah sure, why not give them a rolling stop? This exercise was of course, useful to draw attention to whatever legislation they want to pass but, really, proves nothing about their point.
But that one ice-breaking officer was the only cop at the protest. And that might have been the only downfall of the event. It wasn’t the media, nor the motorists, who needed to see just how bad the current laws are. It was the people enforcing them.
Wait. What? Do cops make laws? Cops should decide to not enforce certain laws?
In any case where the onus is on the cyclist to ensure they are safely running a stop, it should be their call. I don’t see why people have a hard time with it. It is like… LANE SPLITTING.
laws are ranked in terms of misdemeanor and felony levels, and some laws are de/prioritized over others. possession of pot in some places might be criminal, but if you don’t flaunt it – no problem.
one of my pet peeves is people failing to use turn signals ( sometimes because people are talking on their phones, or just being lazy ) – that’s illegal, but almost no one gets tickets for that.
cops, and justice departments, only have so much time – and there are an insane number of minor, old, or irrelevant laws.
Go read the comments on any cyclist rights video on YouTube - there are oodles of them that state plainly that bikes are supposed to be ridden on the sidewalk.
Many people (if not most) learned everything they needed to know about bicycles when they were six years old, and think that those rules apply to grown-ups.
The real issue, if I’m reading the comments right, is that a little consistency would go an awful long way to bridging the divide. I have to say as a cyclist that I try to be predictable, but if I do something like stop at a stop sign, it’s unpredictable because so few cyclists do it. I’m firmly in the camp of “give me reasonable rules and make sure everyone is following them.”
Bikes aren’t that fast, compared to cars. Especially when accelerating
from a full stop – at a stop sign, for example.
The first part is true, but my experience is that a reasonably experienced cyclist will accelerate faster than a car from a full stop. After a few seconds, the car will generally overtake the cyclist. This is particularly dangerous (and annoying) for cyclists smushed between two cars and why it is generally safer for cyclists to move to the front of a line of cars when stopped at a traffic light. This is yet another way that cyclists should behave differently from motorists.
A stop sign is a stop sign , and it is not a suggestion but a requirement, even in a parking lot.it is required that a vehicle, no matter how many wheels or if it is human powered or powered by other means, come to a full and complete stop and only proceeding afterwards when it is safe to do so.
