Research: Bike Rolling-Stop Laws Don’t Lead to Unsafe Behavior

According to a study out of Oregon State University, “Laws that let bicyclists treat stop signs as yield signs lead neither riders nor motorists to act unsafely,” according to a new story out of the university’s newsroom. According to the study’s leader, David Hurwitz, the findings are important as more and more states consider bicycling rolling-stop legislation. Rolling stop advocates say rolling stops allow riders to keep their momentum through intersections — where nearly half of all bicycle-car crashes happen — “theoretically reducing intersection congestion and crash risk because the cyclists are getting through the intersection faster,” the article explains.

The project was conducted by the OSU College of Engineering and used a “novel experimental technique” of linking separate bicycle and motor vehicle simulators, running 60 subjects in pairs simultaneously, and having each subject interact with an avatar of the other in a virtual world. The pairs went through 16 “live-interaction scenarios related to a bicyclist and motorist encountering one another at a four-way, stop-controlled intersection, according to the article. Study lead Hurwitz said they evaluated safety-relevant behaviors associated with laws stemming from the “Idaho stop,” which was passed in 1982 but largely ignored around the country until 2017 when seven states enacted bicycle rolling stop laws.

“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 … No one has looked at how well bicycle rolling-stop laws work, or what happens when you educate people about them. Our networked simulator study design let us evaluate driver and rider behavior and their understanding of the law,” Hurwitz told the Oregon State University Newsroom. Their findings also indicate outreach and education about rolling stops would be useful: After receiving education about rolling-stop laws, Hurwitz said bicyclists preferred to yield rather than stop and went through intersections faster, while drivers approached intersections either more slowly or at a similar speed instead of becoming aggressive toward cyclists they would have previously perceived as breaking the law.