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Comment by btbuildem | Hacker News Reader

I take this as evidence to support my argument that (at least in North America) stop signs are mostly unnecessary and utilized badly. 90% of them could go, some replaced by yield signs, some just removed. An intersection with a line of sight onto cross traffic should not have a stop sign.

Maybe the robot drivers will finally drive home how dumb some of our road infrastructure is.

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This is purely an anecdote, but in my city it's hard to cross a road as a pedestrian even when there's a stop or a priority light for pedestrians. I've been honked and yelled at for "not crossing fast enough" or whatever. Of course it's not the norm and most drivers are respectful and doing just fine, but even a couple of those in a month gets annoying.

I shiver at the thought of having to cross any of these if there was only a yield sign. The principle that I have priority is not important enough over not getting hit by a bad driver.

TL;DR: I agree 100% with your point, but I do think bad drivers should be taken into consideration.

You're definitely correct that yield signs make it harder to be a pedestrian–most American cities are awful for pedestrians to begin with, outside of a small core downtown area. Even intersections with proper crosswalks and lights are often massively wide with no middle refuge, have traffic crossing the crosswalk from multiple directions/lanes and poor sight lines, require multiple long waits at lights to cross all the various lanes etc.

There seems to be a growing use of traffic circles (with yield signs) in the US, which are very much like playing real life Frogger as a pedestrian: cars coming quickly around the circle, often not 100% comfortable with how it works, watching for cars around them instead of paying attention to people crossing at the exits. In a busy intersection you sort of have to step out and try to get someone to stop for you or dash across a gap in traffic–a firm stop required for cars makes for a much more pleasant crossing.

I used to feel the same way until I realized stop signs are traffic controls that do more than cause cars to stop. They reduce traffic speed, allow pedestrians to cross roads, and can shift traffic patterns. Often these secondary effects are not obvious to drivers.

There are stop signs that shouldn't exist but they're the minority.

A trivial sign that you find a minor inconvenience probably saved some innocent driver thousands of dollars in insurance payments when a separate, at-fault driver took them to court.

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