• Posted August 28, 2024

'Rolling Stop' Laws for Bicyclists Are Safe, Study Suggests

“Rolling stop” laws that let bicyclists treat stop signs as yield signs are not dangerous, a new study demonstrates.

Both bike riders and drivers perform safely in intersections once they’ve been informed about how the law works, results from lab experiments involving bicycle and motor vehicle simulators show.

“The focus of previous research has been crash-data analysis and why riders are motivated to do a rolling stop even when it’s illegal in their state,” said lead researcher David Hurwitz, a transportation engineering professor with Oregon State University. “No one has looked at how well bicycle rolling-stop laws work, or what happens when you educate people about them.”

Also known at the “Idaho stop,” rolling stop laws for bicyclists have been approved by eight states, researchers said.

Idaho led the way back in 1982, followed by Oregon in 2019 and Washington in 2020. The other states are Arkansas, Delaware, North Dakota, Oklahoma and Utah.

The laws allow riders to keep their momentum, theoretically reducing congestion at intersections and crash risk because cyclists move through the stop more efficiently, researchers said.

Nearly half of all bicycle-car crashes happen at intersections, Hurwitz noted. In 2022, 1,105 U.S. bicyclists were killed in collisions with motor vehicles, a 13% increase from the previous year.

For this study, researchers observed 60 people in pairs as they operated separate bicycle and motor vehicle simulators in 16 “live-interaction” scenarios. In each scenario, the bike and car simultaneously approached and navigated a four-way stop intersection.

“Our networked simulator study design let us evaluate driver and rider behavior and their understanding of the law,” Hurwitz said in a university news release.

Previous research has shown that drivers tend to be more aggressive toward cyclists when they think riders are breaking the law, Hurwitz said.

This study showed that after learning about the rolling-stop law, bicyclists preferred to yield rather than stop and thus got through intersections faster.

On the other hand, drivers told of the law approached intersections more slowly or at a similar speed.

“The findings suggest more outreach in regard to rolling-stop laws would be useful, and this research gives decision-makers information to support prospective legislative policies, set up educational programs and design robust enforcement practices,” Hurwitz said.

Such education is particularly important in the Pacific Northwest, as Oregon and Washington have two of the largest percentages of bike commuters in the nation, Hurwitz said. 

About 2% of Oregon workers and just under 1% of Washington workers commute via bicycle, researchers noted. There are about 22,000 bicycle commuters in Portland, and about 17,000 in Seattle.

The new study was published recently in the journal Transportation Research Part C.

More information

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has more about rolling stop laws.

SOURCE: Oregon State University, news release, Aug. 26, 2024