Bicycles, Rolling Stops, and the Idaho Stop from Spencer Boomhower on Vimeo.
I would love to see Rolling Stops decriminalized for bicyclists. Bike routes in San Francisco run through areas that have less car traffic, but the reason they have almost no cars on them is that there's a stop sign on every single corner. Cars like to drive where there are stop lights that are timed for the speed limit, which is why there isn't a lot of car traffic on say, Page Street. Keeping the cars and bicycles in separate traffic routes is a great way to keep both car drivers and bike riders happy and safe. Wouldn't it be nice if bicycles enjoyed the same ease of through way on Page Street as cars did on Fell Street and Oak Street? It wouldn't hardly effect car drivers to allow bikes on bike routes to yield at stop signs and it would decriminalize what 93% of bicyclists are doing already. Yet I hear from car drivers all the time that it wouldn't be "fair" if bikes were allowed to yield when cars are required to stop.Fairness is not about what is even, it's about choosing rules based on what people need. It wouldn't be "fair" to say to people in wheelchairs "if I have to walk up the stairs to get to work, so do you", even though that would be even. This comes up a lot in schools when kids with learning disabilities get extra time on tests. Often times we mistake fairness with sameness. "It's not "fair" that they get more time on a test than I do." Yet, kids with learning disabilities need more time to be able to process the exact same data as normal kids, so intelligent caring teachers find ways to give it to them. Some teachers see that some kids don't have the legs to walk up the stairs the same way as everyone else in the class does and they make the rules to be actually fair as opposed to even. Every time I bring up granting bicyclists' better rights I hear very similar cries of "it's not fair" against these ideas from car drivers as I heard from the other kids in my classes against me as the one kid in class with learning disabilities growing up. I guess it's human nature to automatically misperceive that "fair" is always equivalent to equal.
The rules of driving are based on the needs of cars. However, cars and bikes don't have the same needs. Yet many feel it's "fair" to criminalize the needs of bikes based on the sameness to the needs of cars. Cars have been the dominate user of the public spaces that we've designated for use as our roads for so long, most of us who only use cars for transportation have come to believe that the rules for the car should be the same rules for everybody else who also wishes to use our roads because sameness is "fair". But I would like to live in a world where we are governed by not what is the same for everyone, but rather by the needs of the people being governed. I want to see taxes higher on people who make a billion dollars a year, than on the struggling poor. I want to see kids with learning disabilities get un-timed SAT tests. And I want to see the laws for bicyclists' use of our roads changed so that they take into account their needs specifically. Fairness isn't about what is the same, it's about giving everyone an equal chance based on different people's needs.
Every time I'm stuck in traffic I wish that the person in front of me had ridden their bike instead of clogging my way to work with their car. Every time I can't find a parking spot I wish someone on the block had ridden their bike and not taken up the last parking space with their car. Every time I put $20 worth of gas into my car I wish that someone more had chosen to ride their bike rather than waste gas driving so that their extra supply of gas would have brought down the price of my gas by another penny. A change in the traffic laws for bicycles would make me want to bike more and it would make driving my car easier and more fun as well. I'm thankful for the bicycles in my city. I would like our laws to take into account their needs when traveling around my city too.
