Stop Signs Part 4

I still think that the Idaho Code makes sense, though. And where I think the Code might be a lot more applicable is the town I live in: Fort Collins, Colorado.
Fort Collins is a smallish college town with bike lanes on practically every street. It's flat. On the side streets of Old Town there are almost as many cyclists as cars. And normally I can run practically every stop sign without worrying about imminent death. So why stop?
Seriously. Why stop? I couldn’t really say. So, as a sort of fact-finding mission, I decided to ride according to the letter of the current law for a day in Fort Collins. I’d signal all turns, fully stop at all stop signs, wait at all red lights, ride on the right side of the road, not flip people off, not spit on cars that turn into the bike lane and almost kill me, not cut corners or take weird, questionably-legal shortcuts through sidewalks and parking lots. Generally, I’d be a courteous, responsible, law-abiding cyclist.
I hopped on my bike on a weekday morning, took off East from my house down Magnolia as I do every morning and ran the first three stop signs I encountered, forgetting my vow. Shit. Force of habit.
Once I got the hang of it, obeying the law was easy, if a little unnatural. I waited at a red light at Mulberry and Remington and watched a guy across the street pull up, look both ways and ride across the empty street toward me. I felt a little uneasy when another cyclist came up behind me, wondering, I imagined, why the hell I was still sitting there. The light mercifully turned green and I accelerated away quickly to compensate.
To sensationalize my frustration, I rode down West Myrtle with its quiet blocks punctuated by stop signs – stop signs there more because of orthodoxy than anything else, as far as I could tell. It was sort of pleasant riding this way, to be honest. I soon stopped bothering to accelerate my single 46x16 gear up to spinning pace and instead just lazily turned the pedals down the block, stopped at the end, put my foot down, looked both ways and rolled down the next stretch, smiling at the trees.
I stopped at 22 stop signs the day of my experiment. I could have run 16 of them under Idaho’s Code while 6 were contested and I would have had to stop anyway. I could have run two of the seven red lights that I stopped at.
Normally I would have run all of the uncontested stop signs and red lights. And I don’t have a car so I ride every day. Let’s say that this is an average day. That means that I probably run 5,840 stop signs and 730 red lights in Fort Collins every year – all of them totally legal under Idaho’s code. This may not be completely accurate, but the bottom line is that even though it’s illegal, I run a lot of stop signs and red lights. And I’m not alone.
I sat at the intersection of Laurel and Peterson, a four-way stop with good visibility for an hour between 4:30 and 5:30 pm the next day to see what other cyclists do at stop signs in Fort Collins. 42 cyclists came through the intersection while I was watching. Only two stopped. They both had contested intersections, so they would have had to stop in Idaho anyway. Many of the other cyclists rode through contested intersections without stopping, usually by timing their entry and riding through when they had a space, just like the riders in San Francisco, just like me. But most of the cyclists had uncontested intersections and they just rolled through without a care. A roadie in spandex coasted up, looking back and forth, and then pushed through with a couple of stout strokes. A studious-looking foreign exchange student continued her slow pace, looking left and right the entire way through. A gentleman wearing a tie and a helmet rode through upright and fearless on his comfort bike. An older Cheech Marin lookalike cruised through on a low rider bike with flames. An entire neighborhood glided home, united only by their aloof dismissal of the red signs that tell cars to stop.