A rolling stop is only good enough to prevent a 'high-speed collision' as judged by people wearing steel armor boxes.

If you don't drop to walking speed, it's not a rolling stop, it's flat-out running the stop sign.

I think we can agree that 4mph is not high speed.

I always found it hard to understand what's so difficult in actually stopping when the sign clearly says "stop". The wording hardly leaves any room for misinterpretation, doesn't it?

I'd guess some people want to keep a bit of the momentum going for fuel efficiency? Going from standstill to moving, with a big heavy metal box, requires more energy than simply accelerating an already existing momentum, even if it's just a small momentum.

But I'm with you: Stop means stop

Many stop signs are placed such that stopping for them prevents you from safely observing oncoming traffic. So after stopping at a stop sign you still need to slowly inch forward checking that the path is clear making the stopping portion of the exercise absolutely pointless.

Further my habit of actually stopping has gotten me rear ended and tossed into an intersection. Doing things unexpected can be very hazardous.

Yup, but you still are supposed to, you know, "STOP". :) And isn't it done on purpose? This way, you are not breaking the knees of pedestrians that are crossing the road & you are not sending bicyclists flying. Stop, slowly inch forward (no broken knees, no flying people), enter the road when safe. I'm always wary when walking across the road with a stop sign, precisely because people don't stop at the line.

It's a shame that following signs is unexpected. Somehow, it's not acceptable to run a red light because "no-one is around anyway", but it's fine to do rolling stops?

Cyclists are supposed to come to a full stop as well. They're easy to see stopped right at the corner.

There is at least one state (Idaho [1]) in the US where cyclists are legally allowed to treat a stop sign like a yield sign.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idaho_stop

This doesn't happen, at least from my limited experience in Beverly Hills.

I ride several blocks to work sometimes and I take local streets which all have 4 ways stop signs.

9 out of 10 cars yield and refuse to go. I get the pedestrian treatment.

The problem of rolling stops is when people accidentally do that at a 2-way stop that they mistake as a 4-way stop. This greatly increases the chance of a collision.

The prevalence of rolling stops is much reduced in countries where all intersections are 2-way stops.