I ride my bike to and from work, for a sum total of 13-25 minutes every day, which gives me lots of time to think about how not to get hit by cars.
Our neighborhood subscribes to some sort of newfangled school of traffic flow design. It seems that rather than the relatively predictable "you are on a side street, you must stop at a stop sign at every cross street" design, they chose a design that minimized how many times you had to stop on each street. So if you are driving up Treat from 6th to Speedway, you stop at 5th, but not at 4th, then again at 3rd, then again at 1st. So you only have to stop at every other cross street.
This is great when you are driving around the neighborhood in your car. Having to stop at every cross street is annoying and maddeningly slow. But here's the problem: people are creatures of habit. The either want to stop at every cross street or at none of them.
So yesterday I make my usual turn down Treat, and the people on fourth have a stop sign and I don't, so I proceed to ride my bike through the intersection. But for some reason the person making a rolling stop at the 4th St. stop sign doesn't seem to think they need to actually stop. I'm not sure what they were assuming - that it was a 4 way stop, that bikes don't actually have the same status on the road as cars, that they just aren't subject to traffic laws - but what was certain was NOT that they were thinking "Hey, that's a stop sign, that means I come to a full stop and look before proceeding". Similar things happened twice on the way in this morning too.
Stuff like this happens all the time. The rather hysterical converse happens as well - I'll be stopped in my car at the Treat stop sign, and the person on 5th with NO STOP SIGN will yield to me. WTF?
I don't have a solution, other than to say that humans are creatures of habit, and maybe we should try to make things predictable for them rather than more efficient. Efficiency doesn't seem to be working that well, and I personally am of the opinion that getting hit by a car would be pretty inefficient.
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i've often thought that about the Yield sign. the only reason to use Yield over Stop has to just be efficiency, since if the main road is busy, Yield is exactly the same as Stop. but people don't really understand Yield all the time (witness all the Massachusetts residents that think they have the right of way when entering a rotary!) and so it just causes confusion.
stuff like only putting stops on alternating streets can be characterized as an accounting failure, really -- they accounted for the time it took to stop at every street and decided to alternate, but then didn't account for both the time cost and the danger the confusion could impose.
any time a car stops where it doesn't have a stop sign, to be "nice", it is invariably far less efficient than having a stop sign there, where the rules are clear and understood. i guess the question is how often it actually happens.
(tangentially, this leads me to how we need to teach people not to try to be "nice" while driving, since they are just tiny agents in a huge system and can't possibly have the information to do the right thing; their nicety to one motorist can exacerbate traffic jams for thousands more.)
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