I am sorry to hear about your friend, Dave.

I am a transportation planner, but before I had that title, I wrote to the FHWA that the use of our stop signs was dangerous. I even created a website to explain to them why it was dangerous, and fortunately the stop sign use has been changed since.

Here is how it used to be: stop signs were used in two different traffic situations. The four-way stop was one kind and the stop sign at intersections in which the other roadway did not have a stop sign was the other kind.

Coming from Europe, I got myself into deep trouble here once, and saw other people get into deep trouble twice because of this flawed setup of using the same signage for two different traffic situations. Even when I knew the local situation, I had to correct myself several times and tell myself that I was approaching the dangerous setup and not the nice setup.

I looked up traffic deaths and saw that one in six occurred at stop sign intersections mid 1990s. Something had to be done.

I did not receive confirmation that my FHWA communications led to the changes, but this is the current situation today (officially). If there are multiple stops (3 way or 4 way), then these stop signs must have an additional attachment that says 3-way, 4-way, or all-way.

The most dangerous situation (stop sign at a crossing with high-speed traffic) does not get any additional signage. Adding anything to these stop signs is actually not allowed. They must be naked, all by themselves.

The FHWA gave governments ten years to adjust to this new policy, and if I am correct that was about twenty years ago, so ten years fully enforced. It doesn’t mean there is full compliance, but in close to all cases I have seen compliance.

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The human eye is the most important instrument to keep us safe. When confusing a four-way stop intersection while in reality being at a stop sign where the other traffic does not have a stop sign, it can be difficult to recognize if a car coming toward us is slowing down or not. Sometimes it looks as if a fast-driving car is slowing down, particularly if that is the expectation.

What made it worse was that the stop signs were indistinguishable. They did not tell what intersection the driver was approaching, and looking for the gray backside of a stop sign at the other approach is not a professional way to deal with this. As said, it can be easy to confuse one behavior (stop-and-go) at the spot where that should be stop-and-yield, even when that stop-and-yield location is known.

I looked at the numbers, and the percentage of people dying at stop sign intersections did go down after the years of implementing the new policy, more so than just the overall safety improvements we now have with cars that keep us safer. The FHWA does not put out this data anymore, so I cannot check where we are today.

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Something funny:

Ork, ork, ork,

We eat soup with a ….

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The intention of the joke is to show how the human brain functions. It is actually quite easy to make a mistake and make the answer rhyme with the first line. Many people would have the answer rhyme with the first line, but at least there is no death sentence attached to the little mistake. The bad part about having the identical stop sign located at two different kinds of traffic situations is that it can be quite easy to implement the behavior of one situation in the other situation. Particularly so, when we have one behavior occur often, and the deadlier version only every now and then. It had to be changed, and while the distinction is subtle, subconsciously we do recognize the naked stop sign as more dangerous than the dressed stop sign.

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In Europe, the stop sign is hardly ever used. It is only used in situations where the driver with the stop sign has very poor vision over the intersection. The demand of the stop sign in Europe is that one must remain stopped until everything oncoming and crossing (car, bicyclist, pedestrian, horse, you name it) is out of the way. If you see anything coming from any direction, you must wait until it has passed. Stop means stop, you can’t move until the coast is clear. You can understand that two stop signs can then never be placed at the same intersection because both drivers would not be allowed to move.

Your friend died because he didn’t pay attention enough. But the standard of that required attention was of a complicated level, something that should have never been put in place in traffic.

Yes, roundabouts are much safer and I think they are worth the money (and cheaper than putting in traffic lights that still has higher number of accidents).

But we must also investigate what we are doing. Attaching two behaviors to one single sign is not smart, no matter the logic of the one sign and no matter the familiarity of the traffic situation. Traffic signs must be plain, must be simple, must be understood one way only, and must be used in one kind of traffic situation only. Had it been up to me, I would have replaced all stop signs at roads with traffic that did not have to stop with a different sign. Or (and this is cheaper), add a row of shark teeth (white triangles) just before the white stop line on the ground.

I hope you forgave your friend from making that mistake. I hope you see it was not just him, but also the overall setup.