More and more cyclists are hitting the roads across the GTA fighting for space with the buses, cars and trucks that already claim the streets. In an occasional series, the Star will look at the issues that cause friction between drivers and cyclists.

When Cycle Toronto executive director Jared Kolb is riding toward an intersection, he will look to see if any other road users have arrived before him.

If someone has, Kolb will stop and yield the right of way. But if the coast is clear, Kolb bends the rules a bit.

“I use four-way stops . . . basically as yields,” Kolb said. “I don’t think I’m alone in that.”

Stop signs are not suggestions. But to anyone who has cycled along empty streets late at night or pedalled through a suburban neighbourhood with no one in sight, the idea of constant stopping and starting can seem pointless.

Kolb’s argument is a common one among cycling advocates. Bicycles rely on momentum, which a cyclist can preserve if they’re allowed to cautiously roll through an intersection.

This manoeuvre is legal in the state of Idaho. Cyclists approaching a stop sign are required to slow down and stop if it’s necessary. But they can proceed through an intersection without stopping if it’s safe to do so. The law also lets cyclists travel through red lights after stopping if they can do so safely.

Some contend that the Idaho law simply formalizes what cyclists safely do every day. Rolling stops are so common among cyclists everywhere that some have dubbed the manoeuvre the “Idaho stop.”

And there’s evidence that relaxing the law won’t lead to chaos in the streets.

In a paper, Jason Meggs, a research affiliate at Berkeley’s school of public health, wrote that there was “no evidence of any long-term increase in injury or fatality rates as a result of the adoption of the original Idaho Law in 1982.”

Bicycle injury rates in Idaho declined by 14.5 per cent in the year after the law was introduced, Meggs wrote.

Correlation does not imply causation, as the saying goes, but at the very least, the relaxed law didn’t make Idaho’s roads any more dangerous.

“While aggregate injury rates include numerous types of collisions, the decline in injuries is consistent with the strong indication that the law actually improves overall roadway safety,” Meggs wrote.

In an interview, he made the case against strict stop sign laws more succinctly: “When everyone’s breaking a law, maybe there’s something wrong with the law.”

Yvonne Bambrick, author of The Urban Cycling Survival Guide, almost always makes complete stops when riding, and believes following the laws closely can reduce a cyclist’s risks.

“I think that cyclists should be following the rules of the road as we have them now,” Bambrick said. “In places like Idaho, they’ve been rewritten for bikes, but that’s not what we have in place now.”

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But amending the law to allow cyclists to make rolling stops makes sense, Bambrick said.

Not everyone agrees. Patrick Brown, a lawyer and the head of Bike Law Canada, believes some cyclists would treat an Idaho-style law as an invitation to ride recklessly.

“We all do Idaho stops,” Brown said, laughing. “But if you legislate that and you say that it’s allowable that you can do a rolling stop at a stop sign, well some people are going to take that to mean . . . that I can bomb right through it.”