Just a few days ago I wrote about the increasing tension in the UK, USA and Canada between motorists and cyclists, discussing one of the many bones that stick in the jaws of drivers: cyclists failing to stop are red lights and stop signs.
You can get busted for that by the way, and who does the busting?
Yep, the police.
It seems however that it’s not just non-cop cyclists who like to break on through to the other side, without stopping… but bike cops too.
Twitter user Derek Lind just posted a clip of three Toronto police officers on bikes as they passed right through a sign reading, in quite large letters, STOP – without stopping. In North America this procedure is known comically as the ‘Idaho Stop’, for obvious reasons. Currently in Canada the law states that at any stop sign, riders must come to a complete stop and put one foot down before proceeding.
This comes just a few days after another Twitterer posted a video of a cop hiding behind a sign waiting to stop cyclists to check if they were showing their ID, something they are, apparently, not even required to do.
The second vid shows the coops going through the stop sign.
One user (Twitter, not crack) quoted a comment from Constable Sean Shapiro, who runs the social content for the Traffic Safety Programs Unit of Traffic Operations in Toronto:
“We’d like to see more cooperation from cyclists. For them to be more responsible. You really do have to stop at stop signs. There’s a joint responsibility.”
The hashtag #legalisetheidahostop has been trending…
