NP: Chelsea vs. Stoke City

I'm finally blasting through all of the week's news in e-mail form, and found this article in the Sun-Times about traffic laws and bicycles.

In Idaho, bicyclists have different rules -- a stop sign is treated as a yield sign, and a stop light is treated as a stop sign. Bicyclists have to yield to whomever gets to the corner first, and can go when the path is clear.

These rules are more in tune with the reality of bicycling, according to Rob Sadowsky, executive director of the Chicagoland Bicycle Federation.

"It's encoding common sense," said Sadowsky.

Sadowsky said the law recognizes that bicycles have a different range of vision than cars -- they can see 360 degrees around them and are able to judge if an intersection is clear.

And I don't know if it's range of vision as much as it is relative speed. Because you're approaching the intersection at such a slower pace than a car, cyclists should have a lot more time to consider the intersection. I've always said that this makes me consider myself more like a pedestrian than a car in these situations -- to the point where I might exaggerate "walking" my bike across intersections to emphasize that I'm treating them with the respect they deserve as places I could potentially get squashed and die -- but I think this "downgrading" of traffic signals is a much more articulate way of explaining how I feel about it.