Hacker News Reader

Comment by cortesoft | Hacker News Reader

I can’t imagine any of the stop signs here in Los Angeles being able to be replaced by yield signs.

They are almost all 4 way stops, with regular traffic in all directions. If you made it an uncontrolled intersection, or added a yield sign, the road with the yield sign would never get a chance to go.

In fact, there are a number of places along my route to my daughters school where I take a slightly longer way to avoid the intersections without a 4 way stop because I would end up sitting forever trying to turn if I went to one of them.

View on HN

> I can’t imagine any of the stop signs here in Los Angeles being able to be replaced by yield signs.

That's because the roads, as they currently are, were designed for stop signs. Removing those stop signs is going to usually involve changing the roads a bit too.

How would you even go about doing that? You would have to kick people out of houses.

You wouldn't necessarily need more space, but even if you did US streets are already so wide that you can generally apply road diets to them and still get better trafic flow out of them.

You may have identified some warranted stops. Congratulations! In my area, the vast majority of stop signs can be replaced by yield signs, to broad societal benefit.

Yeah, but the comment I replied to said:

> I have yet to see a single city where the vast majority of stop-sign-controlled intersections couldn’t have been better served with yield signs.

So I was giving an example of a city where that wasn’t the case. I never said all stop signs are necessary, I was only disputing the point that most stop signs in ALL cities aren’t necessary.

In cities where there are streets - collectors - arterials you can remove almost all stop signs because the streets see little traffic.

But cities like LA have grown so much that even if they had that at one point effectively every street is a parallel collector and so the traffic volumes are too high.

The “rolling stop” is just proof that most intersections could be unsigned, and then use stop and yield to alert to specifically dangerous ones.

If you rarely or never saw a stop sign, one appearing would be an awakening.

You could replace with a roundabout.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com