You know, at stop signs, do you come to a complete stop, or just slow down, check for blue, and roll through?..
I myself am a stopper.
How about you all?
Stop. Didn’t used to, but I do now. Reason? See below. Have had too many close calls recently, and here’s somethine else that happens to me (unrelated, I know, but still): Even when I check to make sure it’s okay for me to pull out in traffic, and then do pull out - sometimes when I look in the rear view mirror, I’ll ask myself: “Did you just pull out in front of that guy???”
Q
There are a couple of stupidly placed STOP signs that I don’t stop at if I can avoid it. The rest I stop at.
When I first got my license, I would often do “rolling” stops in low traffic areas. Soon after, though, I was riding with my buddy and his mom to the store. We approached a t-intersection in our low traffic neighborhood and she did a rolling stop. A second later we see blues and reds behind us. The cop let her off with a lecture and a warning, but that was enough for me to amend my ways. The last thing I need is for some cop to recognize my car and hassle me over for something trivial, only to later realize he recognized my car because I was the guy that did the rolling stop that one time.
I stop, even in the middle of the night with nary another car in sight. I’ve been told I’m risk averse.
Depends.
If I am familiar with the area and know what kind of traffic to expect, I may do a roll through. There are some stops signs that I stop at every time because I know there will be traffic.
There is one stop sign that I blow through every single time. Mostly out of priciple. It is a T-intersection that I turn left on when going to a certain store. I can not turn right at the T because the road goes right for about 5 feet and stops. There is nothing on that road and every car that comes from the left will be turning right because they have no other way to go. So, it’s not so much a T-intersection, but a 90° turn with a stop sign for one direction.
It’s stupid and I will not stop there. I’ll risk getting a ticket just to go to court and tell the judge how stupid that stop sign is.
When there’s traffic around, I certainly come to a full stop. On a quiet back street I slow down enough to shift into 1st gear, meaning I’m almost at a full stop, but I might be barely inching along.
Those are the ones that can end in tragedy. They put a stop sign there for a reason, so I figure, even if it seems that there’s no one around, it’s prolly a good idea to double check. I can do that on a “roll”, but it’s a really slow roll.
It depends. In my neighborhood, there are large setbacks and a 4-way stop sign at almost every intersection with hardly any traffic and I rarely stop. I do, however, slow down at an intersection that has only a 2-way stop since it is hard to remember that and cars coming the other way will often make a rolling stop, assuming I have a stop too. (That’s only one of the reasons I am utterly opposed to 4-way stops.) But there is one intersection that I go through regularly in a congested part of town that has cars parked right up to the intersection on both sides. There I stop, then very slowly inch into the intersection until I can see past the parked cars, then I go like hell.
My university had a stop sign like this. Basically, there used to be a T-intersection, but the right half of the crossbar on the T had been ripped out to make more room for the university to expand (which also caused one of those obnoxious streets that mysteriously disappear only to magically reappear, with the same name, on the other side of the campus). The curve that was left was quite sharp and did not leave much room for turning cars, though, so I can only imagine that the engineers felt it was safest to keep the stop sign in place, if only to give unfamiliar drivers pause.
ETA: As for the OP, I do an actual stop most of the time. If there is obviously no traffic to be seen for miles and I am in a hurry, then I will do one of those hit-the-gas-just-nanoseconds-before-the-car-stops kind of rolling stops.
I stop. A few years ago, we got the entrance to our subdivision made into a four-way stop, and the police were out enforcing it for a while, so I got into the habit of making sure I came to a full stop, and I’ve kept doing it almost everywhere. I still see them there once in a while. There’s a stop sign on my work’s property that should be a yield sign, and I just blow through that one.
With the exception of one four-way stop around my house, I come to a complete stop, maybe not at the line but certainly before the front bumper is sticking into traffic (I didn’t used to). If you try to completely stop at that one four-way you will be run over from behind, the locals have been begging for a light for years.
Just an anecdote, when I was a teen (late 90’s) there was a local trend to drive with your lights off at night which of course resulted in a number of deaths of my classmates (either hitting each other or being t-boned by large trucks). At night, I always made sure I stopped and looked for anything that could, possibly, might be moving.
Most of the time. Dad was a truck driver and he was a stickler about teaching us safe driving.
I had developed a bad habit of rolling through stop signs when in a large parking lot, but this habit eventually worked its way into my regular driving. Once I caught that, I went back to stopping completely even in parking lots.
Oh, man, I hate those stop signs. I would often drive across a Meijer parking lot in order to get to a plaza exit with a traffic light (I always prefer intersections with lights). That Meijer lot had at least six flippin’ stop signs along the front. Yes. I get it. You want me to yield to the customers. I think I can somehow manage that without six stop signs, thankyouverymuch.
You’d still pay the ticket, however.
That judge would more than likely tell you if you think the stop sign is stupid, attend a city council meeting and state your case to get it taken down.
I agree with you, but as long as it’s up, it’s the law to stop there.
Quasi
Rarely do I come to a full stop.
How much I slow depends on my familiarity with the area and the presence of other traffic/pedestrians.
Never stoip in parking lots unless pedestrians present.
I ALWAYS come to a complete stop for pedestrians.
The only ticket I have ever gotten was for rolling a stop sign when I was 18. I actually should not have even thought about rolling that one because it was indeed at a tricky intersection.
Now, I always stop.
Except in parking lots, which don’t count, because you can’t get a ticket in a private lot.
I decided a while back that I wasn’t a very good driver, and that I needed to drive more carefully to avoid more accidents. So I stop.
Plus, it’s a pretty stupid reason to get a ticket. As Gallagher said, “If you’re in that much of a hurry to get somewhere, leave home sooner.”
I always come to a full stop.
Then, if it’s a four-way (or more) stop, I spend a few seconds directing the idiots at the other stop signs (“you first, now you, now me WHICH MEANS YOU DON’T GO ASSHOLE”) because apparently one of the requirements of living in Seattle is that you have the part of the brain that understands order-of-right-of-way at these intersections disabled or removed.
Usually, although I do so very grudgingly at certain stupidly 4-way intersections.