It seems to me a) from when I have been there and b) what I pick up from osmosis that American road junctions have loads and loads of stop signs which just aren’t necessary - they could be what I think you call yield signs (correct me on terminology if wrong) instead, without any junction remoddelling. The essence of a stop sign here is that it’s only put there if it is almost impossible in a normal vehicle to cross the line at even walking pace with enough time to check that nothing is coming - they are therefore on very few junctions. Also, I have never heard of anyone getting in trouble for not actually stopping at one in the very few cases where you actually can go quicker than a couple of miles per hour but then it does seem like American police, (just like the French), are far more focussed on sitting around looking for drivers to give tickets to for “easy” offences that earn revenue than ones here.
So what’s up with this? Is it deliberate to try to earn money? Outdated standards? Utterly atrocious drivers that can’t be trusted to yield to whoever has the right of way?
I’m struggling to think of examples of stop signs that could be reasonably replaced with yield signs. On my daily commute, stop signs are in two basic types of intersection. One kind has stop signs for a side street intersecting with a main street. Main street obviously has the right of way, and its traffic is fast and heavy enough that a stop really is necessary in most such cases. A yield sign for the cross street only makes sense when there are really long sight lines, since the main street traffic could be driving 40 - 60 mph. I think I’ve seen a few yield signs like this, for example when a minor rural road (45 mph speed limit) crosses a rural high way ( 55 mph speed limit) and you can easily see a mile in each direction along Ohio farm land.
Then, there are four way stop signs, at an intersection between equivalent sorts of streets. Right of way is entirely determined by who gets there first (or with simultaneous arrivals, car to your right has right or way). You have to stop to figure that out.
Also, stop signs are more commonly used when there’s lots of pedestrian traffic, such as downtown areas or residential neighborhoods. So the stop signs are generally slowing car traffic, and giving pedestrians more chances to cross the road and be seen by cars.
In my mind, “yield” almost means “don’t even slow down unless you’ll hit something”.
At least in the town where I live, there would be constant accidents without stop signs or stop lights.
On the street where I grew up, and where my mother still lives, the corner at one end of the street was a 2 way stop (meaning there were stops signs for the traffic on my street but not the cross street). I’d estimate that, on average, there was a collision 5 or 6 times a year. Some of them were bad enough to send people to the hospital, and there were a few deaths over the years. At the very least, it should have been a 4 way stop.
Within the last month they finally erected stop lights at the intersection, something people had been fighting for since I was a little kid. I no longer avoid that intersection.
I don’t know what’s different between where you live and the US, but we definitely have a need for signs or signals at most, if not all, intersections.
Maybe we have more traffic?
ETA: At least in my area, the only place where I see yield signs are on some highway on-ramps, and many people either ignore them or don’t know what they mean.
A difference in philosophy. US traffic engineers believe that stop signs save lives by forcing traffic to come to a complete halt. UK engineers feel that a Yield is plenty good for safety.
Heh. I exaggerate a bit, but I can’t dispute your overall statement.
There definitely are yield signs in a lot of places where “yield” means “match speed with traffic and find an opening”. You’ll see yield signs as you come along an on-ramp and merge onto the highway, for example. If you slow down (or god forbid, stop) you are much more likely to cause an accident. The traffic in the lane that you merge in to does not expect you to slow down, they expect you to accelerate to highway speed, and they’ll yield (a bit) to you to give you room to merge.
A tradition in some American cities is that individual aldermen have the power to have stop signs put up in their wards. One of their consituents complains that fast drivers are making the streets unsafe? The solution is to put up a stop sign – it’s there 24/7 and easier to arrange than a police patrol.
If you compare US and UK drivers, our friends across the pond are MUCH more diligent in stopping at pedestrian crossings. Because American drivers seem to have big problems in yielding to little old ladies and other sympathetic personages, to say nothing of yielding to an asshole in a Hummer with those synthetic bull testicles hanging from his trailer hitch, I think the idea of getting rid of stop signs and trusting the public to obey yield signs, is simply a non-starter.
I would also not be surprised at all if there is a chicken-and-egg question of causation here: do Americans fail to yield because they are used to seeing stop signs? Would driving habits change if cops could focus on ticketing people who fail to yield? All good questions, but they are probably academic.
I will note that DC has put in a couple roundabouts in the last few years, replacing stop signs. After some initial confusion on how to deal with a traffic circle, the one in my neighborhood is an unqualified success, greatly reducing congestion at that intersection, plus improving friendliness to pedestrians. But there’s just no way that this country could renovate large numbers of intersections to traffic circles; there’s just too many.
I drive a residential road that is met by another road to create a T junction. They made it an all-way-stop. The main road gets about 600 cars an hour. The other road gets probably 10 an hour. Why on earth is that an all-way-stop? Because some genius decided to put it there to control traffic speed.
This is why people roll through stop signs, because much of the time they aren’t there for a reason!
Or, because people who use the lesser-traveled road complained to the local government about long waits to get out onto the main road at that intersection.
Similarly, stop signs often get put up when local residents complain loudly and extensively about unsafe traffic at their intersection. It may not take too many accidents (especially car-vs-pedestrian accidents) to get such a stop sign put up.
Here in Canada we follow the American model of excessive stop signs and bad driving. Even 60 miles from the nearest town, you might find a stop sign on the gravel road joining the highway.
“Yield” means “Yield right of way”. I don’t think many people practice that here; they interpret it as “don’t stop”. If a stop sign is not present at the intersection, unless it is really really obvious which is the major road, people are liable to drive right through the crossing with no thought for cross traffic.
And as mentioned, Stop signs are a cash cow. If the police say you did not completely stop, they ticket you for a hundred dollars or more. They love to sit near them and hand out tickets.
One of the offramps on my commute home forms a T with the offramp from another freeway to create a two-lane one-way road; the left leg was supposed to be dedicated to the turning cars, and the right leg to the cars going straight. Originally, the bottom leg of the T had a yield sign to the right-to-left leg, but the incoming part of that leg was on the crest of a hill, so it wasn’t always obvious that there was traffic coming; what made it worse was, the cars that turned tended to turn into the right leg, since that leg led to an exit to a shopping complex. It was recently turned into a stop for the turning cars, which made it much less likely for a car to turn just as an oncoming car was approaching.
As much as everyone is complaining about enforcement, IME police aren’t really that strict. Very few people come to a 100% complete stop if the way is clear. I probably slow down to 2-5 mph, and have done so in front of cops. They won’t bat an eye unless you really blow through the stop at maybe 10+ mph, or do something otherwise stupid. Yeah, in some cases stop signs are “revenue generators”, but even in those cases the cops can ignore most of the people who slow to 5 mph and just ticket the really egregious violations.
I won’t go so far as to claim that US drivers aren’t bad (because that’s ridiculous). But it’s kind of silly to claim that drivers in one area are bad because they drive based on the traffic laws and customs they were taught and have lived with their entire lives, rather than those used somewhere half way across the globe.
That’s not my claim*, it’s more a claim of drivers not being able to cope with the stuff if the law was changed. It’s not unreasonable to hold that belief, especially given how it’s basically impossible to pass an American driving test and there is not really an equivilant to the Insitute of Advanced Motorists and similar organsiations that we have in the UK.
Growing up with a certain system doesn’t necessarily make you a better driver by the way. For example, the Isle of Man and the UK have essentially the same driving laws and road layouts and so on with one exception: On around half the tarmac, and most of the roads, in the Isle of Man there are no speed limits. Seriously, I can make you a video tomorrow of me driving perfectly legally and safely in my car at 140mph and I’m not talking about motorway/freeways either, I’m talking about roads like this.
Yet the general standard of driving in the Isle of Man, compared to that of the UK, is utterly attrocious with many drivers scared do more than 50mph (still far better than US, or say Belgium, though). Furthermore, in Finland where you basically have to drive so slowly that you could walk faster, the standard of driving is astounding.
So clearly driving standard is not just about what rules you’re used to.
As I was going to answer above this post “or enough deaths occur that there is a push for more stop signs to prevent them”, but you already made the point.
This intersection on County Road 70 in an industrial park in suburban Lakeville Minnesota was finally made a 4 way stop after years and years of 2-3 deaths per year from people getting off work and then turning straight out onto the 50mph highway in front of fully loaded semis. Or trucks blowing through the stops and hitting people. Yeah, most of it was idiots running the stop signs on the side streets. But putting stop signs on the main road significantly cut into the number of accidents and deaths.