On the roads I travel frequently, there are stop signs controlling most of the intersections. Just about any city street that doesn’t warrant a traffic light or a roundabout gets a stop sign.
The purpose is to give the main road the right of way. But my question is this:
Why not use a yield sign instead?
The only discernible legal difference between the two, is the stop sign requires the wheels to stop turning (the car must settle back in the suspension) even if nothing is coming.
The ultimate effect of either sign is the same; the main road has the right of way; you give way to the other cars.
I am wondering how coming to a full stop when nobody else is coming makes me any safer.
Most of the roads on which I travel are middle of nowhere rural highways. They are designed around the automobile for an obvious reason: there isn’t anyplace worth going within walking distance; unless you consider 40 miles to town to be “walking distance.”
And one thing that often gets neglected; perception of safety does not equal safety. Often times, it creates a false sense of security that actually makes people more dangerous. I think it was the book “Traffic” by Tom Vanderbilt where I read that pedestrians are twice as likely to get hit in marked crosswalks than when crossing without them.
a) it removes doubt about enforcement (either you did or you did not come to a complete stop), and
b) it removes doubt in the minds of other drivers (once you have completed the stop, or it can be reasonably anticipated you will complete the stop, other drivers can stop worrying about what you are going to do, and
A lot of intersections around me are four-way stops.
In those that aren’t, there is often not good line of sight, so someone not stopping at a yield because he doesn’t see anything coming could be disastrously wrong.
Third, quite a few major roads have right turns from smaller roads with yields. Tons of people would rather speed up to get through rather than stop to wait for oncoming traffic to pass. Often right in front of me. That makes traffic on the main road brake, which is dangerous. Happens also on right turn at red intersections, but not as often.
I have no evidence to support this, but I believe that sometimes stop signs are put in to make that particular road more inconvenient and therefore encourage traffic to move to another road.
My city added a stop sign a block and a half from where I live. It’s a bit of a pain, but I and my neighbors are glad of it – it appears to have reduced the overall traffic on that street. Drivers used that street as part of a route that bypassed two stoplights, but included more stop signs. I hypothesize that the number of stop signs now makes that alternate route take longer than the stoplight route typically takes, so more are taking the stoplight route.
The road into my little subdivision is also the entrance to a school. For about 30-45 minutes every morning and every afternoon there is a continuous stream of traffic. The city has tried everything from speed bumps to yield signs, but during that time of day, it’s nearly impossible for residents of the subdivision to get in or out. Finally the city broke down and put stop signs in simply to force people to give residents a shot at having the right of way.
So we really only need the signs for 90 minutes a day, 180 days per year – 270 hours or about 11 days total. But when we need it, we need it.
In very rural areas, a stop sign becomes, in effect, a yield sign. If no one can see you and there is no traffic in any direction, you can be sure few stop signs cause a full stop.
There’s nothing to say that you have to have these stop signs everywhere. We don’t have them here - we have yields (or as we call them, “give way”) here instead.
I started a thread specifically about this difference and the consensus was that a sizeable amount of American drivers would plough through yields assuming that if they couldn’t see any other vehicles the coast was clear.
Personally I strongly recommend you change your system, but its your country!
