Unless you live in Chicago. Sorry Cecil you’re out of luck.
Seems like this will be tough to enforce. I can envision cops hiding in the bushes with stop watches. 
Wouldn’t it be easier to fix the stop lights? Stop lights used to turn red/green with a timer. It didn’t matter how big the vehicle was.
Basically, for motorcycles a red light is like a stop sign. You stop, wait until its clear and go. Is this how you read the law?
Most stop lights use a capacitive sensor embedded in the street to detect the presence of a vehicle. It’s been years since I rode, but most of the time my bike wasn’t big enough to trigger the signal. This meant that I could either run the light or sit there for minutes or hours until a car came along.
“Fixing the stop lights” would possibly mean tearing up the street at every intersection, the the sensors might still not be sensitive enough or might trigger regardless of whether a vehicle was there.
Only Dopers?
It’s part of our new membership drive.
I used to live in NY and there all the sensors were large and rectangular and my motorcycle would never trip the sensor. (I ran quite a few red lights) Here in California the sensors are smaller and circular and I would say my motorcycle will trip it 9 out of 10 times. A large improvement.
Although I don’t think running red lights is the best solution to this problem it is a solution and it should be implemented everywhere.
Here in NJ they have pretty much done away with the in road sensors. Now they look like little cameras up on the poles.
Actually they are inductive, not capacitive. There’s a loop of wire buried in the road, and the controller measures the loop inductance. You don’t have to dig anything up to adjust the sensitivity. the only part under the road is the wire itself. The controller will be mounted on a pole nearby. Adjusting the sensitivity is as simple as turning a knob inside the controller box. You can make them pretty darn sensitive if you want. I was able to set one to trigger on the metal in my steel toed boots once.
They are supposed to be adjusted to where a motorcycle will trigger one but a bicycle won’t, which is a fairly fine adjustment. They don’t want to make them too sensitive otherwise they end up with a lot of false triggers which unnecessarily cause the lights to cycle and slows down traffic overall. If you ride and you come across a light that won’t trigger from your bike, call, write, or e-mail your local traffic engineer and tell them which light needs adjusted. They can’t fix what they don’t know about.
While adjusting one is fairly simple to do, it does take a bit of time. Going around and periodically checking and calibrating every single light in someplace with as many lights as say the city of Chicago would easily be a full time job for more than one person.
Microwave sensors mounted up on the traffic light are becoming more popular since they are cheaper to install and maintain (don’t have to dig up the road and run wire all over the place). Those may have a bit of difficulty picking up a bike as well just due to the smaller size. I haven’t seen the small circular traffic detectors mentioned upthread, but I assume that those are some variant on the buried inductive loop sensor.
This is welcome news for me. Near my house there are 5 lights I can think of off the top of my head where I have been stuck through 3+ cycles of the lights because the sensor didn’t pick up my bike.-
I didn’t know bikers couldn’t do this. I’ve been doing in Wisconsin for as long as I’ve been riding (which isn’t that long). I know which lights my bike will and won’t trip and the ones that it won’t trip I’ll run the light once I’m safe to do so. For the record, the ones I get stuck at are places where the only way to make a left turn is with a left arrow so I’ll go with the straight ahead traffic once I’m clear to go.
In one particular place, my bike won’t trip the sensor so if if I’m first in line I have to pull past the stop line and sometimes even motion for the person behind me to pull up so he/she can trip it. What’s worse is that it’s a double left and if it’s just me and someone next to me and they pull past the sensor we still won’t get a light, I’m running the red…but it’s scary when they go with me (expecting the arrow).
I’ve actually written the city about this intersection. The stop line is kinda far back and you feel like you can pull past it and it’s easy to not see it (especially in winter). They need to put a “STOP HERE ON RED” sign up or redo the computer so it will give a green arrow on the next cycle if someone crosses the sensor rather then someone sitting on it.
That sucks for bicyclists, who are supposed to follow the same laws of the road as motor vehicles. So if I get in a left-turn lane on my bicycle all by myself, it’s expected that I will wait for half an hour (or however long it takes for a car or motorcycle to pull up behind me) to get a green arrow?
In PA, bicyclists can go thru these; however, at some intersections, it’s like the old video game, Frogger; you may make it across, or you may end up a hood ornament.
In Toronto, they have what might be separate sensor loops for bicycles in some areas. There are three dots on the road above the bike sensor.
I used to do exactly that when crossing the street on my way home from work. If I didn’t leave during the busier hours, the light leaving the parking lot would never change…sometimes I’d just go to the side walk and hit the pedestrian cross button. There was always traffic on the 6-lane cross street.
-D/a