http://grist.org/cities/why-bikers-should-live-by-the-same-laws-as-everyone-else/
By Ben Adler, May 22, 2014
All of us who ride bikes know the feeling of not
wanting to stop completely at an intersection when there’s no one
coming. It’s an understandable impulse. Far more often, though, I’ve
been legally walking across a street and had a bike roll through the
crosswalk, forcing me to freeze in mid-intersection as it breaks the law
and crosses my path. Sometimes, it zips frighteningly close.
But some cycling advocates argue that we should make
it legal for bikes to go through a red light, after stopping to check
that there are no oncoming cars and pedestrians. This is called the
“Idaho stop.” Legal only in Idaho and a few towns in Colorado, it also
allows bikes to roll slowly through stop signs, treating them
essentially as yield signs.
The idea has been picking up steam for the last few years in local blogs from
San Francisco to
New York, thanks partly to this oddly popular
video. In a recent, widely read
article in Vox,
Joseph Stromberg compellingly laid out the case, drawing on the
authority of physics: “So many cyclists do these things … because they
make sense, in terms of the energy expended by a cyclist as he or she
rides. Unlike a car, getting a bike started from a standstill requires a
lot of energy from the rider. Once it’s going, the bike’s own momentum
carries it forward, so it requires much less energy.” (Of course, if we
made traffic laws primarily about physical efficiency instead of safety,
we’d all be roadkill.)
Jeff Miller, president of the Alliance for Biking
& Walking, argues that because bicyclists can more easily see and
hear pedestrians than drivers can, rules designed for cars should not
necessarily apply to bikes. “We don’t perceive any concern or threat on
the part of pedestrians” from the Idaho stop, he says.
But bicycle advocacy groups are split on the issue.
Miller’s coalition has not taken a position on the Idaho stop; many of
its member organizations support it, but other leading cycling
organizations don’t.
Even if the Idaho stop is good for bike riders, it’s not good for cities.
Advocates never put it
in these terms, but Idaho stops essentially allow bikers to impose on
pedestrians’ green lights and rights-of-way. Bikers would be prohibited
from going if a pedestrian is in the intersection, but if a biker gets
there first, a pedestrian would have to wait at the corner until the
bike passes, possibly running out of time to cross. Do we really want to
create a mad dash to be first at an intersection and claim
right-of-way? As our population ages, and empty nesters return to
cities, this would have a particularly negative effect on the elderly.
Idaho stops favor bikes instead human beings on two feet. But pedestrians are the lifeblood of a vibrant city.
Traffic lights and signs are how we organize urban
movement, so that it can proceed safely. If we were going to exempt one
group from these rules, the logical one would be pedestrians, who are
the least dangerous group to other users, not people going much faster
on metal contraptions. No pedestrian has ever killed a bicyclist by
running into him, but the opposite
does happen.
Stromberg invokes pedestrians to make his argument,
writing, “Like bikes, pedestrians don’t need to come to a complete stop
to avoid accidents at intersections, which is why you don’t see them
weirdly freezing in place when they arrive at one.” You don’t? I see
them do it, and I do it myself, every time I walk to a corner with a red
light or stop sign. Even hordes of reveling Seahawks fans
weirdly freeze in place at intersections.
Pedestrians cannot legally jaywalk, and responsible
parents still teach their kids not to. Of course people do, and they
rarely get ticketed.
And that provides a good model for bikes. Idaho stops,
like jaywalking, should not be legalized; they should be winked at,
with the law going unenforced except in truly egregious cases. Insofar
as Idaho-stop advocates are complaining that police ticket cyclists for
running lights when no one is coming, their complaint is valid.
Enforcement efforts should be targeted at the worst traffic offenders,
which are mostly cars because they are much bigger, faster, and more
dangerous than bikes, and their behavior is often just as bad. In New
York City, for example, cars routinely block the crosswalk, making
street crossings unsafe for pedestrians.
But officially allowing bikes to steal a pedestrian’s
right-of-way would go too far. It might encourage even worse behavior:
If most people, using any mode of transportation, will tend to go a
little further than the law allows, looser laws would make cyclists more
inclined than they are already to blow through reds without stopping
and through stop signs without slowing down.
Indeed, some prominent urban bicycle advocacy
organizations, which are already battling cyclists’ outlaw image, don’t
think it would be helpful to legalize the Idaho stop. “Bike Minnesota
does not agree that bicyclists should be able to roll through stop
signs. It would especially be a problem in cities,” says Dorian Grilley,
executive director at the Bicycle Alliance of Minnesota. “There is
plenty of data out there that shows that bicyclists are regarded as
scofflaws. That is a reputation BikeMN is working to change.”
Transportation Alternatives (TA), the leading bicycle
and pedestrian advocacy group in New York City, agrees. “In New York
City, the reality is that our intersections are the where the majority
of crashes occur,” says Caroline Samponaro, TA’s senior director of
campaigns and organizing. “Signals, and people obeying them, is how we
can create predictability and work together to make sure that everyone
is safe. We think that everyone should obey the signals.”
And enforcement of the Idaho-stop rule would be
difficult. Imagine the arguments over whether a pedestrian, car, or
other bike was or wasn’t already crossing the street before the biker
started doing so. “Education and interpretation would be challenging
with the Idaho law,” says Grilley.
There is a larger point at issue: the mistaken focus
on easing the movement of bicycles even at the expense of pedestrians.
Biking is a good and important part of urban transportation. But, in any
major city, there are vastly more trips made on foot than by bike.
(Just look at the commuting
mode share
in Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C.) Many people — the elderly,
the disabled, small children, shoppers carrying large items, the drunk,
the desperately poor, people who need to wear business suits, people who
hate getting sweaty — will always walk instead of bike. Their needs
must be accommodated, because walking and public transit can be a backup
option for bikers, but biking is not always an option for pedestrians.
Foot traffic is also the most crucial ingredient in a
vibrant city streetscape. Street peddlers selling used records, carts
selling food, window displays, break dancers, politicians shaking hands —
they are all there to interact primarily with pedestrians, not
cyclists. There’s a reason some of the world’s greatest outdoor public
spaces are “pedestrianized,” not “bicyclized,” streets: closing a street
to cars, and bikes, and letting pedestrians fill it, allows people to
safely stand around, say, watching street performers or browsing
shopping stalls.
As Felix Salmon, an avid biker himself, o
nce
noted
in a Reuters column, some of the world’s best cities for both biking
and walking, such as Amsterdam and Copenhagen, expect bikers to obey red
lights and stop signs.
It’s not coincidental that the Idaho stop was invented
in Idaho and hasn’t taken off in many other places. Idaho is one of the
lowest-density states in the U.S. In parts of Idaho, biking may often
be the main alternative to driving because distances are too great for
walking to be practical. And it may be quite rare that pedestrians must
stop at the corner to let a bike pass. This would be very different in
America’s great cities, where biking is growing in popularity.
None of this is an argument against the other
accommodations for cyclists that we all know and love, such as protected
bike lanes, public bike racks, and bike-share programs. In all of those
cases, helping bikers and helping pedestrians go hand-in-hand, as
people can more easily shift between walking and biking, and the
traffic-calming effect makes streets safer to walk as well as bike.
That’s why groups like TA
support
all of those measures, and more. It’s only when the two groups’
interests collide that we need to remember which is more essential to
urban mobility and the urban experience.
In the 20th century, America made an epic mistake: We
retrofitted our roads to accommodate machines instead of people. Let’s
not make the same mistake again.
