Traffic laws and non-public roads

Factual Questions
1

This might be one for Uncle Cecil, but…

I’m in Aurora, Colorado, just outside of Denver. It’s fairly common in shopping malls here to put up stop signs at pedestrian crossings - where people exit a store and have to cross a parking lot traffic lane to get to the parking area. One nearby mall has FOUR stop signs in the space of about 100 feet, in front of a department store. I have no problem with yielding right of way to pedestrians in a crosswalk, but stopping four times when there are no pedestrians (like when the store is closed) seems ridiculous.

On private or corporate property, are general traffic laws enforceable by the police? What if the owner of a shopping mall buys stop signs by the dozen and puts them out in the mall parking lot in willy-nilly fashion? What if I buy one and put it in my driveway? Can the police enforce these or any other traffic signs posted on other than public roads?

When I lived in Virginia I learned how the law applied there. A young driver tried to evade the police by driving into a large construction area at night. He turned his headlights off, made some turns, got caught anyway. The police said that they couldn’t prove an attempt to evade. They also couldn’t ticket him for speeding, failure to signal turns, etc., because this was on private property. They were able to charge him, though, because he turned his lights off while driving. Driving at night with headlights off is considered reckless driving in Virginia, and the police explained that reckless driving is the only Virginia traffic law that applies on private property.

So, are laws in other states the same? How do stop signs and other traffic laws apply on non-public roads?

2

In Ohio, reckless operation applies on private property.

3

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=71308 answers your questions, along with many other prior GQ on the SDMB, if you’d bother to make a search.

4

In Australia, the road traffic law applies on private roads as well as public roads, provided that the road in question is one that is normally accessable and used by the public.

This means that someone who has a prang in the local supermarket carpark can still be pinched for driving without due care or failing to give way etc.

5

In Aurora, the location of all stop signs in a commercial development should be shown on site plans that were approved by the Planning Department. If you get nabbed by the cops for running one of these signs, head to the 6th floor of City Hall, and ask for a copy of the “site plan mylar” for the property in question. (You may have to look at a master map, showing the case numbers for all the approved site plans in an area.) If the stop sign is not shown on the plan, you may have an out.