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Old 10-04-22, 02:09 PM
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UniChris
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Drivers yielding to you when they're not supposed to can indeed be very frustrating - especially because one driver doing so doesn't mean that the others you'd interact with if you took that invitation are also going to be accommodating.

You'd think that things like slowing or even stopping well short of the intersection would make your intentions clear, but they'll even do it then, too.

To be fair though, you can readily see people in threads right here angrily demanding that drivers accommodate beyond the law in this manner - nevermind how dangerous it is to accept that invitation, or get used to expecting deference outside the law, they insist that such deference be made.

Further, your own words "I have no confidence in their intentions...." are how a lot of drivers actually do feel about cyclists - they don't know if we're going to stop in those many, many places where it's actually the cars that have the right of way, so they assume that we're not going to, and that assumption becomes such a habit that the inertia of assuming we're not going to stop continues even after we have stopped.
We need people on both sides to actually follow the laws.

There is, however, one thing I'd like to see, and that's to have major rail trail intersections with minor roads have a stop sign on the road. That won't happen so long as trails are treated as parks rather than transit routes, but it's very much needed - especially as so many road/rail intersections have terrible geometry and brush is allowed to grow wild at the corners making the sightlines even worse.

The reality is that "yielding" to bikes on a typical cycling route doesn't work, because even rather slow cyclists can move from being out of sight behind obstacles to into the roadway far too quickly. We should only be asking drivers to yield to cyclists if we are willing to require that they STOP even when there doesn't appear to be anyone on the intersecting path - crosswalk type "yield or keep moving" rules work for pedestrians, but not for cyclists, and road vs road type yield rules only work if the cycling routes have the visual sight-lines of roads and the cyclists are being careful to ride well out from the visual obstructions of their edges.

Either the drivers have an actual stop sign, or the cyclists have to assume that it is we, and not the drivers who have to yield - because in physical practice it is, and in much of the US the law even says so.

Last edited by UniChris; 10-04-22 at 02:21 PM.
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