New Mexico to allow cyclists to roll through stop signs
Starting on July 1, people riding bicycles in New Mexico will be able to ride through stop signs without coming to a full stop, and stop at red traffic lights and continue even if the light hasn't turned green — as long as it's safe to do so.
That's according to a new state law Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed on Friday.
Senate Bill 73 changes New Mexico's traffic law to allow cyclists to treat stop signs as yield signs, and to treat red traffic lights as stop signs and proceed if there are no other cars, cyclists or pedestrians.
While it may seem counterintuitive to people who don't use bicycles, this is already common practice among bicycle riders in New Mexico because a cyclist wants to carry their momentum on the bike, said Sen. Antoinette Sedillo Lopez, who carried the bill, during a hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Doing this gets the cyclist out of the blind spot of motorists who have stopped at an intersection, Sedillo Lopez told the committee.
Eric Biedermann, a board member at-large of nonprofit advocacy organization BikeABQ, told the committee being able to treat a stop sign as a yield sign and a traffic light as a stop sign enhances cyclist safety because it reduces their exposure to cars, increases their visibility to cars and reduces the risk of being 'right hooked' if a car doesn't see them or a 'left cross' from oncoming traffic.
'There are a number of ways in which being able to proceed through an intersection with a head start before the cars move really enhances cyclist safety,' Biedermann told the committee. He was also speaking on behalf of Bike Santa Fe and Velo Cruces.
The so-called 'Idaho stop' — taking its name from the first U.S. state to ease traffic laws for cyclists — resulted in a 14.5% reduction in cyclist injuries a year after the state of Idaho enacted a similar law in 1982, according to a review of Idaho Office of Highway Safety data.
In New Mexico, between 2019 and 2023, 1,457 cyclists had crashes, according to the University of New Mexico Geospatial and Population Studies Center. Of those, 39 were killed, 115 were seriously injured and 694 were able to walk away.
Lynn Pickard, a retired New Mexico Court of Appeals judge and member of Santa Fe Seniors on Bikes, told the committee data show that as many as half of collisions between cars and bikes happen within intersections.
'So anything we can do to get cyclists into and out of the intersections quickly — leaving of course, for us, to determine our own safety if there are other cars there or pedestrians there — would be really helpful for us,' she said.
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