Originally Posted by richardmasoner
Stop signs are used to give an indication of who has the right of way at an intersection. Attempts to use stop signs as traffic calming devices -- which is what Scavenger is proposing here, though in an interestingly innovative way -- have failed miserably. The overuse of stop signs to calm traffic has led to
vehicle operators ignoring stop signs.
The local powers that be have never heard of, or ignore, your point that traffic calming stop signs leads to the running of those signs. 4-ways are appearing like weeds. As a cyclist, I LOVE them, because I treat them essentially as 2-ways; I wish ALL the back street intersections were 4-way. It's true that many drivers do rolling stops, but that's all I need to go either before or after them. As a driver,I'm not really bothered by all those 4-ways because I've only got to go through 2 stop signs to get to a main artery.
Locally, all those stop signs on back streets haven't "failed miserably", as you claim, in calming traffic. In fact, they have succeeded by driving traffic off of the back streets onto the main arteries; So, the back streets which would be designated bike-roads ALREADY have very little mv traffic .My proposal would encourage mv drivers even MORE than they are now to use the main arteries.
I agree with your point that stop signs should be used to indicate who has the right of way. So, if the cyclists are exempt from stopping then they would HAVE the right-of-way!