STOP Signs at Oasis Senior Center
In response to a comment about cyclists running STOP signs at the corner of Marguerite and 5th Avenues in front of the OASIS Community Center in Corona del Mar, we took a few minutes and recorded the traffic activity there. The intersection is controlled by STOP signs at all four approaches.
While no cyclists came through the intersection, many motorists did.
You will note that motorists only come close to actually stopping (and not necessarily before the STOP sign/line) when there is already another motorist at the intersection (and then not always). There are not really any actual ‘stops’ in the one-and-a-half minutes of video. The other ‘slow rolls’ or ‘California Stops’ as they are sometimes called are simply contraventions of the law.
In this grainier video made a few days before you will note that even when pedestrians are present in the crosswalk, motorists fail to stop:
Just for perspective: in the second video some of the motorists, even when pedestrians are present, are running the STOP sign at a good rate of speed – about the speed that casual cyclists or children would ride a bicycle on the street.
The points here are that:
(1) people tend to criticize cyclists for this kind of behavior without realizing it is absolutely commonplace among motorists; and
(2) while motorists are used to it, and can ignore it because they are protected in their own vehicles, vulnerable pedestrians and cyclists have a genuine grievance against this behavior.
Saturday, July 23rd 2011 at 8:28 am |
I’ve heard that a cyclist coming to a complete stop and the loss of human-powered momentum could be compared to a motorist coming to a stop, putting the gear in park and exiting the vehicle before proceeding; you can imagine how often the driving public would put up with that if it were deemed equivalently necessary!