Can anyone direct me to research on the environmental effects (atmospheric, etc.) of stop signs? If I come to a complete stop at a stop sign, it obviously takes more gas to get back up to 25 mph than if I had rolled through it at 10, 5, 2, or even 1 mph. Here in southern California we need all the help we can get reducing our atmospheric pollution, and if replacing some stop signs with yield signs would help (wherever it’s safe to do so), this would seem like an obvious contribution.
My back-of-the-envelope estimate is based on a guess that my mpg would drop from 20 to 1 if all I did was accelerate up to 5 mph, brake to a stop, and repeat ad nauseam. And since I could probably do that 100 times in a 1 mile stretch of road, I would have “wasted” nearly a full gallon of gas with all those stops and starts (ignoring the .05 gallon it would have taken to travel that same mile without stopping). While my saving one one-hundredth of a gallon by rolling a single stop sign seems trivial, when you multiply it by the 5500 vehicles passing through that intersection each day, the atmospheric effects would be significant. (Might as well plunk down a 55-gallon drum of unleaded in the middle of the intersection and set it on fire…)
And that’s just the acceleration side of the equation. When you toss in the brake pads, rubber tire dust, etc., it seems like we should replace every one that’s not at a crosswalk with a yellow yield sign…