surasshu

this is gonna be rambly bc i’ve been drinking but bear with me, i have thought about this a lot.

like, i know, stop signs are iconic, and it’s great that kids know what an octagon is in this country by the time they’re 2 years old, but that’s basically where the benefits of stop signs end.

stop signs, to me, are part of what i think of as “aspirational infrastructure”. this is infrastructure or rules of the road, that seem like good ideas for safety reasons, but are counteracted entirely by the reality of road design & driving. an example that i think a lot of people can relate to is max speeds. roads in america are not DESIGNED for the top speed that the signage says. so you’ll get straight shot roads with huge lanes and nothing in your way, and you’re supposed to go 25mph on them. but NOBODY does this!

what this does is it creates drivers who routinely break these rules. the only reason not to break these rules is because you might get ticketed, not because driving at a higher speed feels unsafe (like proper road design would do).

american road design is absolutely packed with these aspirational designs, where the signage is saying one thing (usually, the safe thing), but the road design SCREAMS for you to ignore it. if you’re not supposed to park on the sidewalk, why is the sidewalk soft so its easy to do? why are the turns soft so that you can blast thru them at double the speed that the rulebook said? and so on!

the other day i saw a tweet by someone saying that their friend just does U-turns wherever they feel like. like, yeah, there’s signs but they dont feel unsafe doing it. this is a moral failing, to be sure, but its also an infrastructure failing. if you don’t want U-turns, design the road so that U-turns are all but impossible (not hard to do), and you won’t have U-turns.

anyway. i feel most people are on the same page about the above, but for some reason stop signs don’t seem to get the same scrutiny from infrastructure folks from what i’ve seen. like, with stop signs, you’re supposed to come to a FULL stop, EVERY time. very safe, right? but it goes against every instinct and design of any vehicle you care to move thru traffic: car, bike¹, motorcycle, you name it. it just fucks with your flow so bad. having to come to a dead stop and then move the thousands of pounds of metal again is such a pain (not to mention pollutive). and on a bike you’re using your muscles to do it so it’s even worse arguably!

so what happens? over time, you kiiiinda stop but nobody’s coming, you KNOW nobody’s coming, you’ve lived on this street for like 6 years, and by now… you roll thru the stop sign. everybody does it. you do this again and again and it becomes a habit. now the stop sign is useless for safety because instead of drivers paying attention when approaching an intersection, they see a stop sign and go “i wonder who that sign is for” while rolling thru and (after doing it a thousand times) hitting a pedestrian.

on top of that, 4 way stop signs that are busy, are big bottlenecks for traffic. going through the stop 1 car at a time is SO SLOW. it’s confusing too (i think anyway, ymmv on this). roundabouts are the answer here! or at the VERY least, raised and narrowed intersections with yield signs instead of stop signs (or even no signs at all). roundabouts are massively safer (you CANNOT blast thru a roundabout at top speed, and that is a feature), while also promoting better flow, and imo being a ton simpler.

idk i just get annoyed thinking about places like strong towns arguing in favor of stop signs like. no! argue for diverting traffic away from these conflicts to begin with. make residential areas hostile to cars by making them a maze of one way streets, or even ban cars outright from these areas so kids can play on the street again. stop signs suck shit

1 _{(the idea that cyclists should have to stop at a stop sign is bonkers bananas in its own right, absolutely not. thankfully SOME places are putting in “stop as yield” for cyclists but while i think that makes sense, this does further complicate the rules with weird exceptions that arent obvious from what you’re seeing on the road, and i cant imagine a car understanding that a bike can do that but they can’t… just… get rid of the fuckin stop signs and use something better)}