Reply to City council voted today to allow bicyclists to ignore stop signs

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Argh these posts drive me nuts. It's so obvious that the vast majority of the people posting on this thread have never used a bicycle as their main mode of transportation.

I have. For a year, I biked to work every day. Not in DC, but in another US city.

Coming to a full and complete stop and then restarting on a bicycle is incredibly physical taxing. If you want to fully stop, you need to put your foot down on the ground and then regain all your momentum when you start going again. It's grueling, especially when there are several in a row (as is common). It also does absolutely nothing for safety. When you're on a bicycle, going a typical commuter pace (ie, we're not talking about the Tour de France here), it's very easy to slow down and look, thoroughly, for vehicles and pedestrians as you're approaching a stop sign, without doing that full stop.

There are two ways that this removing this requirement actually increase safety:

1) Every single bicycle commuter quickly stops doing the full stop, because it's so wildly impractical, so you're essentially training bicyclists that the rules of the road don't apply to them. The signs and laws are for cars - bicycles are "different" - and they're not wrong. The rules around stop signs are designed for cars, not bikes. This mindset IS unsafe. It leads to things like not yielding to pedestrians in cross walks (bikers are way worse about this in my neighborhood than cars, I find), not stopping for stop LIGHTS (very unsafe!), going the wrong way down one way streets, etc. Changes like this, that align the rules of the road with the reality of both biking and driving prevent this attitude.

2) When you restart after a TRUE full stop as a biker, you're going very, very slowly the first 10-20 feet. That's when you're in the middle of the intersection! If you actually do this, you can easily come to a full and complete stop, see a clear intersection, and start proceeding forward, and then have a car show up and hit you. This is especially true in non-four way stops, where traffic isn't stopping from the cross street. It might be nearly physically impossible to get yourself safety to the other side of a wide road without risking getting hit by a car.

I understand what people are saying about cars that roll through stop signs - but having frequently done both, there is just such a huge difference in both what it's like to actually fully stop, and what the impacts on safety are. 
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TL;DR: Fat guys in spandex are getting too tuckered out stopping at stop signs. [/quote]

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