Sometimes France is so fricking enlightened it hurts. Lawmakers recently decided to allow “cyclists in some cities to disregard red lights at certain intersections,” Treehugger writes. Paris will be testing the idea at 15 intersections, and Bordeaux, Strasbourg, and Nantes have been running the same experiment for a while. If the pilot goes well, 1,700 Parisian intersections could operate according to these new rules.
Basically, under the new rules, bikes still have to yield — like any normal, responsible person would do! — to pedestrians and cars that have the green light. In the test runs, these rules haven’t led to any increase in fatalities. No data is available on whether the new system has led to a decrease in people yelling at cyclists for breaking traffic laws that never made sense for them anyway.
