Ethics and Idaho Stops

Randy Cohen was the original writer of The New York Times Magazine’s “Ethicist” column:

THE rule-breaking cyclist that people decry: that’s me. I routinely run red lights, and so do you. I flout the law when I’m on my bike; you do it when you are on foot, at least if you are like most New Yorkers. My behavior vexes pedestrians, drivers and even some of my fellow cyclists. Similar conduct has stuck cyclists with tickets and court-ordered biking education classes.

But although it is illegal, I believe it is ethical. I’m not so sure about your blithely ambling into the intersection against the light while texting and listening to your iPod and sipping a martini. More or less.

I roll through a red light if and only if no pedestrian is in the crosswalk and no car is in the intersection — that is, if it will not endanger myself or anybody else. To put it another way, I treat red lights and stop signs as if they were yield signs. A fundamental concern of ethics is the effect of our actions on others. My actions harm no one. This moral reasoning may not sway the police officer writing me a ticket, but it would pass the test of Kant’s categorical imperative: I think all cyclists could — and should — ride like me.

I am not anarchic; I heed most traffic laws. I do not ride on the sidewalk (O.K., except for the final 25 feet between the curb cut and my front door, and then with caution). I do not salmon, i.e. ride against traffic. In fact, even my “rolling stops” are legal in some places.

Paul Steely White, the executive director of Transportation Alternatives, an advocacy group of which I am a member, points out that many jurisdictions, Idaho for example, allow cyclists to slow down and roll through stop signs after yielding to pedestrians. …

Full column here.

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Randy Cohen’s welcome take on the ethics of cyclists not obeying traffic laws misses the history of such laws. In the early 1900s, streets were a free-for-all. Pedestrians, horse-drawn delivery vehicles, bicycles and streetcars all shared the asphalt. It worked because average speeds were low, four to ten miles per hour. (Any street photograph of the period will show the mix).

The automobile’s higher speed changed this innocent confusion. By 1922, automobiles had killed more pedestrians, mostly children, than Americans who died in World War I. In cities across the nation, outraged mothers campaigned to restrict car speeds and rights of way. But the automobiles, led by industry, dealers and automobile associations, won. Pedestrians were relegated to sidewalks and crosswalks, streets were redesigned for faster travel, and laws were written to benefit automobile travel.

Bicycles were caught in the middle, legally treated as motor vehicles, but slow ones. The law gives no consideration to the difference of pressing your toes down to go 50 miles an hour, and the effort of your legs and lungs to maintain 12 miles an hour. That lack of distinction persists.

As cycling becomes more common and new cyclists confront the nonsense of a full stop at an empty intersection or having to make a left turn from the left lane of an eight-lane highway, sensitive politicians will begin to reconsider why the rules of the road are written just to benefit automobiles. The “Idaho stop” is a welcome first step.