Before you learned to drive a car, riding a bicycle made perfect sense. The rules of the road were, for all practical purposes, the laws of nature. You pedaled harder while riding up a hill and coasted while riding downhill. If you needed to cross a street in your neighborhood on your bike, you simply looked both ways. If a car came into view after you had already entered your view, you simply increased your speed to get out of its way and reach the sidewalk as quickly as possible.
When you became old enough to get a restricted driver’s license, you had to learn a whole book’s worth of rules. This is because cars must navigate roads where they are, in a single moment, near cars going in every direction. Bicyclists are rarely around so many moving bikes at the same time. If they are, it is a bicycle race or a group ride, so all the bikes are traveling in the same direction. An intersection full of bikes sounds like a mess, but fortunately, you rarely encounter such things. Bicycles do share the road with cars, though, and they largely follow the same rules as cars, except when they do not. If you have been injured in a collision between a car and a bicycle, contact a Santa Fe car accident lawyer.
When Multiple Mountainous States Figure Out That California Stop Signs are Safer for Bicyclists
Cars are made to accelerate and decelerate quickly, whereas bikes only change their speed through continuous effort by their riders. When a car stops at a stop sign, the driver must only press on the gas pedal when it is time to go again, and the car will soon be keeping pace with the flow of traffic. For a cyclist, it takes much longer to regain momentum. Anyone who has ridden a bike across a busy urban intersection knows how scary it is to poke along, despite pedaling with all your might, while cars zip past you, to know how hard it will be to get out of the way if a driver does not see you.
Experienced cyclists know that the best workaround is to bend the rules, to slow down at an intersection, make sure the coast is clear, and keep riding, without ever coming to a complete stop. For the drivers of cars, the infamous California stop sign is a show of hubris, but for bicyclists, it is a matter of safety. Idaho formally implemented “California stop sign” rules for bicyclists several years ago. The result was fewer collisions between cars and bicycles. This summer, the “Idaho stop” is coming to New Mexico, and it will officially be legal for bicycles to slow down at stop signs, as they have always done.
Contact Slate Stern About Personal Injury Lawsuits
Slate Stern is a personal injury lawyer who represents plaintiffs injured in bicycle accidents. Contact Slate Stern in Santa Fe, New Mexico, or call (505)814-1517 to discuss your case.
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Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash