Idaho Stop for Cyclists? Drivers Already Do It!

This is actually what this law is about. The difference between a cyclist at a stop sign and your average vehicle is visibility. Cyclists don't have blind spots the way cars & trucks do. So if you can reasonably see that there is no immediate traffic, you don't have to wait at an intersection and risk hoping that another driver at a 4 way stop will respect the stop sign. This whole law is being called the "Colorado Safety Stop" but was initially called an Idaho stop [1][2]. It resulted in a 23% reduction in bicycle crashes in intersections with STOP signs only [3]. Even if you think the results are not intuitive, they are certainly backed by data. Making this a law just means cyclists won't be harassed by law enforcement for doing what is statistically known to be safer. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO] [3] [LINK]

I'll also add that the anger of motorists towards cyclists rolling through stop signs is completely irrational when you take into consideration that approximately 100% of motorists also run through almost all stop signs, so long as they aren't blocked by an other car. This twitter video exemplifies it pretty well [LINK] We just take for granted that cars will blast through stop signs at a pretty high speed (maybe 10 - 20 km/h?). But when we see a cyclist do it, for some reason there seems to be some sort of optical or logical illusion that makes it stick out to us more. If you look at the speed these cars are going at, a lot of them are probably actually going at around the full cruising speed of a casual cyclist. So, considering most cyclists would actually slow down somewhat to roll through a stop sign, they're probably actually going faster. Oh the Urbanity! Recently had a great episode on this as well [VIDEO]

It's not as comprehensive as you're probably looking for, but I saw a video a while back with some observations on this in Ottawa: [VIDEO]