Stop or yield? New research supports law change for cyclists

Cycling advocates in British Columbia hope a new U.S. study will boost the case to allow bicyclists to yield at stop signs and safely roll through intersections.

While it's the law in jurisdictions like B.C. for cyclists to stop at stop signs, like every other road user, it's common to see people on two wheels opt for an illegal yield — rolling past the sign after checking it's safe to proceed.

"It makes it a lot more efficient," said Vancouver cyclist Ben Cooper about getting through intersections. "I'm not going to come to a full stop. Like, the amount of energy it takes to stop my entire bike and get it going again — it just doesn't make sense."

The debate over whether rolling stops for cyclists should be enshrined in law has been ongoing since the early 1980s when Idaho first made it legal, resulting in the manoeuvre being named the Idaho stop.

Several other U.S. states have since followed suit, including B.C.'s Pacific Northwest neighbours of Washington and Oregon. No jurisdiction in Canada has yet adopted laws for rolling stops for bikes.

Cycling advocates in B.C. say they've been pushing the issue for years and hope a new study from researchers at Oregon State University, published this month in an academic transportation journal, will aid their argument.

"It is going at a very slow pace and we need to take dramatic, bold steps that will enable us to reform these outdated laws and have more people … cycling," said Navdeep Chhina, director of campaigns and inclusion with Metro Vancouver's HUB Cycling.

The Oregon study says with proper education for both cyclists and drivers, Idaho stops do not lead either riders or motorists to act unsafely.

One of the study's authors said they wanted to look at how well rolling-stop laws work, in a change from other studies that have looked at crash-data analysis and why riders yield at stop signs rather than stop as per the law.

"It required fully connecting two independent simulators, running subjects in pairs simultaneously and having each subject interacting with an avatar of the other in a shared virtual world," said David Hurwitz, a transportation engineering professor, in a release about the study.

Researchers observed 60 people paired off who went through 16 virtual interaction scenarios as either a cyclist or motorist, coming together at a four-way-stop intersection.

They found that instead of drivers being aggressive toward cyclists who appeared to be breaking the law by rolling through, driving participants approached intersections either more slowly or at a similar pace after being educated about what bicycle rolling stops were.

Cyclists, after also being taught about Idaho stops, preferred to yield rather than stop and went through intersections faster, meaning they spent less time in the intersection exposed to potential danger.

Nearly four out of five crashes involving cyclists in B.C. happen at intersections, according to ICBC.