Tickets for bicyclists running stop signs during KC group rides

Columnist Mike Hendricks, himself an avid bicyclist, writes this week about a recent police crackdown on groups of bicyclists running stop signs during group rides in the Kansas City area:

Word on cycling blogs this week is that Prairie Village cops busted 30 bicyclists Aug. 13 for running a stop sign.

Not true.

Turns out that only 17 got $95 tickets for allegedly running the four-way at 79th Street and Belinder Road.

Not that it makes the story any less satisfying, which might seem like heresy coming from me, an avid cyclist.

But I'm far from the only one in the biking "community" who feels that way.

When someone on a local cycling site complained that there are worse things "going on in 'Perfect Village' than some cyclist rolling through a stop sign," someone else offered this:

"It's called 'making every other cyclist in the city look bad and potentially become a target for road rage because the Tour de Blue Moose Racing Team acts like jackasses and ignores all warnings and traffic laws.'"

Without wading into the middle of this controversy, I'd just remind everyone that bicyclists are indeed subject to all the same traffic laws as motorists--you have to stop whenever there is a stop sign, signal turns and lane changes, be lit up at night, and so on.

So if a police officer observes you rolling through a stop sign--even "safely" at low speed--you can end up getting the very same ticket and paying the very same fine (and, in Missouri, getting the very same points on your driver's license) as you would if you did exactly the same thing in your car.

And if police observe or hear reports of bad bicyclist behavior in a certain area, they are likely to crack down exactly on stop sign enforcement, simply because that is the easiest type of behavior to observe and ticket.

And if you do roll through that stop sign, in your car or on your bike, your defenses are limited--because the law really does say stop, not just come sorta close to stopping.