As a pedestrian I will take a busy light controlled intersection with a pedestrian scramble type walk signal over a busy 4-way stop where every single time.
With the 4-way stop there is never a time in the cycle when all traffic is stopped. The drivers who are present are continuously paying attention to what other drivers are doing which robs them of situational awareness to note pedestrians. You can try and time it but that's risky. With the walk signal there is a brief moment in time when the drivers are doing nothing but waiting for you and are all stopped so you as a pedestrian can account for them in preparation just before you get your signal and make your move.
The author can get lost with this sort of textbook correct but questionable in reality take. Legally having the right of way doesn't make you any less dead when the driver who's got three other drivers to pay attention to doesn't see you.
This is why it's often safer to "jaywalk". If you're in the middle of a block, you only have to look two ways. Even if you screw up, a driver going at a reasonable speed is more likely to see you anyway because you're directly in front of them. I'm not exactly advocating for crossing in the middle of a street in North America since it's depends a lot on the situation, but there's a reason why people sometimes just do it intuitively, and it's unfortunate our infrastructure doesn't know how to address it.
Jaywalking is very common in the Northeastern US, and I believe it is generally safer when done well. I have a rule that if you don't feel like you can calmly saunter across the street, you shouldn't jaywalk by running across, but many people do not follow such a rule, and just take the soonest opportunity they can find to run across the street.
Be careful, though - I once jaywalked when I was with some friends from the Midwest and they were very offended.
> With the walk signal there is a brief moment in time when the drivers are doing nothing but waiting for you and are all stopped so you as a pedestrian can account for them in preparation just before you get your signal and make your move.
Having almost been hit a few times by drivers making a right turn on red, I can tell you the drivers never wait even if you have the right of way. You'll be lucky if they even look for you.
> Legally having the right of way doesn't make you any less dead when the driver who's got three other drivers to pay attention to doesn't see you.
Also, and I know this is unpopular, but maybe you shouldn't dress like that if you don't want the attention.
Why is right-on-red always cited as the biggest problem with turns? My anecdotal experience is that drivers turning on green are way more likely to hit me when I have a walk signal on the cross-street than drivers who turn right on red.
Here's how I handle right on red: When I have the walk signal, I look to my left for cars that might be turning right. If there are any, I look at whether the driver sees me. Try to make eye contact. If they are moving and apparently don't see me or are going to turn anyway, I wait. I may have the right of way, but I'm not going to win that battle.
> Having almost been hit a few times by drivers making a right turn on red, I can tell you the drivers never wait even if you have the right of way. You'll be lucky if they even look for you.
Right on red should not really be allowed. It's a real hazard.
Right on red is (or should be) never allowed during a pedestrian scramble. That's just asking for trouble. The box must be entirely clear of cars during the walk signal.
>> Legally having the right of way doesn't make you any less dead when the driver who's got three other drivers to pay attention to doesn't see you.
>Also, and I know this is unpopular, but maybe you shouldn't dress like that if you don't want the attention.
in driver's ed you're taught to "drive defensively" i think the same applies to pedestrians. Don't just step into the road when the walk sign comes on, have some situational awareness and protect yourself.
Worse yet, at least in Seattle, are right arrow lights that go green at the same time as the walk light. You get a green light to go and pedestrians start crossing at the same time. Having a green light and a walking sign on should be mutually exclusive.
A pedestrian scramble means that no vehicles should be moving through the intersection period. It is a time in the cycle where ALL vehicles stop, and pedestrians can use the intersection freely in any direction, including diagonally.
In Toronto for instance, the majority of pedestrian deaths are caused by impaired/distracted drivers with a significant portion of failure to yield by left turning drivers at major, light controlled intersections.
There isn't even a category for "four way stop" pedestrian fatalities.
Speed is nearly everything and controlling (ie. reducing) speed should be the primary way to influence fatality rates.
Having lived in both Toronto and SF, both cities with 4-way stop and controlled lights intersections.
I'll take 4-way stop any day since speeds are lower. Much better to get hit by a car at near zero speed than a right or left turning car at higher speed. Which is probably why Toronto doesn't have a category for four way stop fatalities.
(The worst are SF's 2-way stops at intersections between equally-sized roads that show up randomly throughout Sunset. Worst of both worlds.)
What you are describing has a major sampling bias: most pedestrian fatalities will be at large intersections with many lanes crossing each other. Those intersections are on busy streets where drivers are going fast and where there are an insane number of conflict points. Yes, they're invariably controlled by a signal, but that's because a four-way stop is totally out of the question. The signal didn't cause the fatalities, it was necessary to install it because of the same factors that lead to fatalities.
Using that data doesn't remotely begin to predict what happens when you take a small four-way stop and add a signal to control it. Adding a signal does not create new conflict points, it does not increase the speed limit on the road, all it does is control the intersection in a more aggressive way.
> With the 4-way stop there is never a time when all traffic is stopped and the drivers are always paying attention to what other drivers are doing. With the walk signal there is a brief moment in time when the drivers are doing nothing but waiting for you and are all stopped so you as a pedestrian can account for them in preparation just before you get your signal and make your move.
That's... not true? With light traffic a 4 way stop should have no cars at all at it most of the time, leaving pedestrians with the right of way, whereas with a traffic light there will always be a road with priority until a pedestrian hits the button. Requiring cars to pay attention to the condition of the intersection is the explicit design goal.
This was laid out very clearly in the article we just read.
>That's... not true? With light traffic a 4 way stop should have no cars at all at it most of the time, leaving pedestrians with the right of way, whereas with a traffic light there will always be a road with priority until a pedestrian hits the button. Requiring cars to pay attention to the condition of the intersection is the explicit design goal.
>This was laid out very clearly in the article we just read.
<facepalm>
This is what I mean about theory vs reality.
4-way stops don't look like the animation they show you in driver's ed. In practice what happens is that non conflicting traffic tends to parallelize so someone taking a left might start their left while the person across from them is finishing theirs (or one of any other bunch of combinations) so there's a car in motion basically all the time the situational awareness of every driver who's about to get their turn is mostly absorbed in monitoring who's turn it is and who's going where.
So when you're a pedestrian and you don't time it right you could find yourself starting to cross right before someone wants to drive where you're crossing. Usually this is because you started walking before it was their turn and they didn't notice you until it was their turn and they started moving (because they were accounting for the other traffic) until it was their turn at which point they started looking where they were going as well. Normally this results in absolutely nothing, you speed up a little, they don't gas it as hard, everyone goes on their merry way. But the potential for things to go badly if the conflicting driver is inattentive or further distracted is very much there.
Sure, theoretically the rules say they shouldn't do that but that's not how reality works.
There's just so much less potential for conflict if there is a scheduled time when all the cars stop and then the walking happens. Even without a dedicated walk time it's just so much easier to time it when there's a light because you can start walking when all the cars have red and only have to look out for right on red or potential red light runners, it's a much easier problem than the degree of swiveling your head around you need to do to at a busy 4-way.
A stat of how many injuries occurred at this intersection would help settle your point. You're talking a lot of theory, where this person seems to have lived and traversed this intersection many times without incident.
Was the upgrade worth $600,000 in this town, this street? And why, if it is a small town with heavy pedestrian traffic, does it default to vehicular movement instead of pedestrian movement?
> The author can get lost with this sort of textbook correct but questionable in reality take
I find this perspective very weird when (1) the "textbook" take (i.e. the one traffic engineers follow) is to almost always prioritize vehicle speed and driver safety over everything else, and (2) in what world is it questionable in reality when it existed in reality for decades, seemingly without incident?
It's not even a textbook correct take. Its less risky to run a stop sign in a clear intersection than to run a red light. There are more people likely to run a stop sign on an empty intersection than a red light.
A 4-way stop is the best intersection for pedestrians in terms of speed. Just keep walking and don't yield your right of way. You may need to put up a hand to make yourself seen by the occasional distracted motorist. But because all vehicles need to stop, the average speed you are dealing with is 0-5mph, so the risk is low and everyone has time to react. Compare that with any lighted intersection where some cars are going full speed, making it a far more dangerous scenario.
I get your point, but still, while the "pedestrian scramble" is maybe good for pedestrian safety, it's probably the worst solution for pedestrian speed. If the pedestrian lights were at least green at the same time with the car light in the same direction, you would at least have a chance of crossing the street without having to wait. This way, the lights never turn green on their own (as seen in the video), so you always have to press a button and wait.
Plus, the author is wrong about both drivers running the red light. YEs, they are pushing the yellow, but they are both legal insofar as the car is over the line when the light turns red.
The first "running the red light" car at 11sec has his/her bumper fully over the white line in the last yellow-light video frame and his wheel fully on the line in the first video frame when the light is red. The second "running the red light car" has the entire car more than half way across the intersection with the light still yellow.
His point still stands that people are rushing to make the light, but it does his point no good to exaggerate like that.
While the 4-way-stop was maybe better for pedestrians, as traffic increased that would degrade.
Overall, it probably would be favorable to fix it in favor of pedestrians instead of vehicles, and to that end they should be narrowing the street and adding close-in trees and obstacles to cue the drivers that it is a much slower zone.
Make it a roundabout with protected pedestrian crossings. That forces drivers to be looking at the conflict point with pedestrians as they manoeuvre the roundabout.
I was very impressed in Denmark, where that roundabout approach worked very well. Every car slowed down & stopped for me at the crosswalks.
It turned out that that was because they installed a cobblestone speed bump in front of every crosswalk. Cars slowed down even if no pedestrians were around, because otherwise they were going to pop a tire. It made walking so much safer than anywhere else I've been.
Those don't fix it in my experience. There's one about a quarter mile from where I'm sitting right now and I avoid it when walking because of how dangerous it is. Yes, they will see you crossing... as they almost hit you. They recently redid it to be a bit safer for driving on (before people were unclear on how many lanes it had and which lanes could turn where) but it doesn't seem to have improved the pedestrian experience much.
in practice i find this does not work well at all… for some reason in roundabouts is when cars most feel justified in running down a pedestrian in a crosswalk. sometimes i think they’re just afraid to slow bc of the cars behind them
> With the walk signal there is a brief moment in time when the drivers are doing nothing but waiting for you
In my area, there are plenty of stop lights with pedestrian signals where both are active at the same time. This allows the traffic to flow if there are no pedestrians on the assumption the drivers will recognize the pedestrians have right of way. To me, this is bat shit crazy level of assumptions. Either protect the pedestrians, or you might as well remove the pedestrian signal.
> I captured two drivers ripping through red lights in that short span
Video actually shows two cars entering the intersection on yellow lights, which is legal. The rest of the article seems similarly exaggerated.
----
Edit: For those who disagree, please be aware that the stop lines are out of frame, so both cars are already in the intersection before they're visible on the video. You can get a better picture of what the intersection actually looks like here: https://maps.app.goo.gl/L37hZyvXs8BeWmFE8
Except the article doesn’t claim what the drivers are doing is illegal.
The article says that the street design causes drivers to speed up and makes the intersections unsafe.
Instead of drivers always stopping, or at the very least slowing down, when approaching the intersection, the new street design leads to drivers speeding up when approaching the intersection.
This is bad design for pedestrians irrespective of whether the driver jumps a light, the pedestrians cross when they shouldn’t be, or neither of them are doing anything wrong.
It will increase the odds of collisions, injuries and possibly fatalities.
> Except the article doesn’t claim what the drivers are doing is illegal.
The article states “… and I captured two drivers ripping through red lights in that short span.” I suppose “ripping through” can be left up to interpretation.
However, in the video the author says “that person just ran a stop… a red light right in the middle of me filming.” Then the other he says: “I bet this guy runs the light. Yup, see, this person ran the light, too.”
“Running” a red light is an illegal act.
I think in both cases the cars should have slowed down and had plenty of time to stop before entering the intersection. But, evidently that’s legal in California, while the author indicates otherwise.
I had to look this up. In California in particular, this is true, which surprised me.
Per a random law firm:
California’s yellow light law permits drivers to enter an intersection during a yellow light. No violation exists unless any part of the car is over the stopping line when the light turns red. However, the law encourages drivers to slow down before reaching the intersection.
Whereas in, for example, Massachusetts, this would be considered running a red light.
If this surprises you, consider the alternative: Driving through a yellow being illegal or unexpected doesn't make sense, given the finite stopping distance of cars, and reaction time of humans. This is because the yellow light is the first explicit indicator you must stop.
If this doesn't make sense still, picture this scenario: You are driving at the speed limit. You are 500ms from crossing the stop line threshold. The light turns yellow.
Your interpretation would make sense only if there were a (paler yellow?) light warning of the yellow light!
In the UK, if you're at all over the line when the lights change, you're considered "in the junction" and are expected to leave the junction -- the next phase should give you priority to do so. The only way to run a red light is to start crossing the line while the light is red -- although plenty of drivers will start to inch across while they're supposed to be waiting :P.
The most annoying scenario is where a driver has either stopped or inched forwards far enough that they can't actually see the lights any more and don't know when they've changed.
This is the law in Illinois, too. It, in combination with the way the lights are timed, makes some intersections particularly challenging for pedestrians.
The basic way the timing goes is: traffic light changes, pedestrian crossing signal illuminates, traffic going straight that squeezed in on the yellow finally clears the intersection, cars turning left finally get a chance to go, pedestrian can finally safely enter the intersection with approximately 10 seconds left to cross a four lane street, lights change again, cars start honking at the older person with mobility issues who could only get halfway across the intersection in the time they had available to safely do it, impatient driver from further back in the line who doesn't care to figure out why the person in front hasn't started moving even though the light has been green for five full seconds swerves into the right turn lane and guns it, narrowly missing the aforementioned older person with mobility issues as they blast through the intersection.
I'm wondering how you would know when the yellow light was going to come on.
Do you have some sort of countdown, or innate knowledge?
Because, otherwise do you just randomly stop at green lights guessing that a yellow light might come on? Or do you drive so slowly that you can stop in the width of the white line before a pedestrian crossing? Really, I'm trying to figure out how you don't ever enter just as a light turns yellow. Once you do, do you stop in the intersection or try to clear it before it turns red? I hope the latter.
For me yellow lights are a warning that a red light is coming. It should be long enough for cars to clear the intersection (in many states without gridlock rules even this is not the case for left hand turns).
My experience in Boston is that drivers try to beat the green light change and accelerate while it's still red.
Just rewatched and agree they both entered on orange, which is legal. This clear misinterpretation makes me question the author's take as a whole. Did they consider that cars also regularly run stop signs? Is it possible that this is, in fact, safer for pedestrians, albeit more frustrating while waiting?
OT, but it fired me up a bit - people that enter the intersection on green or orange awaiting a break to turn left. And then don’t clear the intersection on red. Now they’re in everyone’s way. How do you get them to understand they’ve already “run the light” and just need to move?
What difference does it make? The main point is that this design induces drivers to speed up even more than they're already speeding (and, this being North America, they're already speeding), at a dangerous point in time when pedestrians are starting to cross. It literally makes no practical difference whether they're entering on a very late yellow or a red.
Legality aside, is that not kind of the issue here? Lights in a high foot traffic area could incentivize people to speed up to make it before the red, which is less predictable and has cars traveling at faster speeds compared to a stop sign, which requires all cars to stop. Embellished yes, but point of the article showing that this intersection is now more dangerous to pedestrians stands imo.
Using stop lights to control this sort of high-traffic intersection is totally normal in the US. Stop signs are typically used for lower-traffic intersections. Subjectively speaking, I think drivers are more likely to obey a red light than a stop sign.
Perhaps the author of this article is upset that the neighborhood now has more traffic than it used to, but that's a different issue.
Yellow generally means do not enter the intersection unless you are so close that you cannot reasonably stop. It is not legal to enter the intersection if you cannot clear it before the signal turns red. Exact rules and enforcement vary by state.
> It is not legal to enter the intersection if you cannot clear it before the signal turns red.
That does not appear to be the case in California, which this article is written about. It seems to be a bit confusing, because there are suggestions that the driver handbook suggests that you should follow the rule you note, but that the law itself has no such requirement.
In practice, in many areas of coastal California almost no one would stop at a yellow unless they felt they could not enter the intersection before it turned red, and doing otherwise would likely be seen as impeding traffic by many other drivers.
In CA we have many intersections where one wants to turn left, but there is not a dedicated left turn signal. When the light turns green, you pull out into the intersection. Ideally you pull out enough that the car behind you can also get into the intersection. On busy roads you may not be able to complete the left turn until the signal goes red. If you chose not to pull out, then nobody would ever be able to turn left. I believe CA passed a law some 20 plus years ago that you must be able to clear the intersection before the red light, which is in conflict with what is sometimes necessary. There are situations though where the direction you are headed is backed up, such that if you pulled out you could end up stuck in the middle of the intersection long after the red light. I believe the law was intended for this situation. So don’t pull out if your direction of travel is blocked.
Both may be legal, but the first one is unclear and is definitely unsafe. Safety requirements dictate a slightly different understanding of yellow light than is commonly used by drivers. For safety, yellow must mean "begin controlled deceleration immediately". The first driver had plenty of time on yellow to not be just barely entering the intersection on red. They clearly were not decelerating and had very likely sped up to beat the light. This unquestionably is a thing that drivers do all the time, and it's dangerous.
Why is it dangerous? (Unless they're breaking the speed limit to make the light, obviously.) Just the risk that they might misjudge the timing and enter the intersection after the light turns red? But lights have a built in delay before turning green to account for that.
When a driver sees a yellow light, they must make a call: do I have time to safely slow down and stop before reaching the stop location, or not? If I do, then I must start slowing down right away - that much we agree o. But if I don't, then I mustn't slow down, as that is more likely to leave me in the middle of the intersection while the lights turn green for through-traffic.
> yellow must mean "begin controlled deceleration immediately"
This is not true in the strong form you used. There is a regime where there is no possibility you will be able to stop the vehicle in time using reasonable deceleration. Slowing does no good. There is also a regime where slowing will cause you to enter the intersection during the red light, and not decelerating will not.
The way I learned this was "in legal, out legal," meaning that you are not allowed to be driving in the intersection while the light is red (aka you have to be finished transiting by the time the light changes).
My understanding is that California has two relevant laws for this discussion:
21453 (a) which prohibits crossing the stop line when the light is red [1]. And 22526 (a) which prohibits entering an intersection when the exit isn't clear. [2]
You have to be able to clear the intersection if you enter it, and you have to enter it on green or yellow (except for turn on red after a stop), but you don't have to clear the intersection before it goes red.
Common practice (which might not be 100% legal) for unprotected lefts on green (where space permits) is for the first car to fully enter the intersection and the second car to roll over the line a bit, then for both vehicles to clear the intersection when opposing traffic stops which may be in yellow or red. The driver that's only a bit in the intersection can make a judgement call and stay slightly encroaching rather than clear the intersection if clearing seems inadvisable because opposing traffic was slow to stop.
In my state you are allowed to exit the intersection while the light is red but may only enter while it's green or yellow. In driver's ed they taught us to enter the intersection while waiting to make a left turn so that we could complete the turn after the light turned yellow/red and opposing traffic stopped.
Generally speaking if you're going the speed limit you don't need to "slam on your breaks (sic)" to stop before a light turns red unless you didn't have enough time to clear the intersection anyway.
I disagree. The first car doesn't even cross their side of the pedestrian crossing before the red light blinks on, so they have had ample time to prepare to stop and are running a red light. The second car is more debatable but also had enough time to stop, as the light turns red while they are still in the middle of the intersection.
The second car definitely entered on yellow. It doesn't matter if they could have stopped. They have the right to enter on yellow.
The first car passed the first line when the light was yellow, but not the second line. The area in between is the crosswalk. I can't tell if "enter the intersection" means "enter any part of the area past the line where you're supposed to stop" or "enter the part past the crosswalk, where the roads actually intersect".
I've sometimes wondered what the exact rule is with red lights. Presumably you're allowed to continue moving forwards if the front of your vehicle passed the stop line before the light turned red. But if you stopped with the stop line passing through your vehicle are you allowed to start moving forwards again while the light is red? (Whether that would be a sensible thing to do would depend on whether you're driving a long vehicle with just a tiny part of it behind the stop line, or a motorbike with just a tiny part of it in front of the stop line, but does the law distinguish those two cases?)
I don't think the law is so specific, but I suspect the right interpretation would be that you should pass through the intersection if the car is in a position where it would block other traffic the moment the light turns red; in any other circumstance, you should stop if the light is red, even if you passed the location where you'd normally wait.
For example, say you're entering the intersection on green/yellow, but the car in front suddenly stops while you're on the crosswalk, possibly not even seeing the light on the side of the road, but no part of your car is impeding the cross traffic. Well, even if the car in front now clears the intersection, if the light has turned red, you should almost certainly stop and wait for the next green light, rather than trying to clear the crosswalk: doing anything else is much more dangerous.
If your vehicle is ever fully stopped past the line, and the light is red, that would be considered a “blocking the box” traffic violation in most jurisdictions. You technically should not have entered the intersection at all without the ability to fully clear it.
I had the same thought. I've been in places where the first one would supposedly get you a ticket, as you are intended to stop if safely able to do so. It looked like that might have been the case there, though it isn't clear at all.
The second wasn't even close to running the light.
I don't see why a re-design like this wouldn't have included both pedestrian and car infrastructure improvements. Tighten all the turn radii, add bump-outs to each corner, and you could have a signalized intersection that is better than it was before for both.
There's no way to know from a single frame. We would need to know the sequence of events.
It's not against California vehicle code to be in an intersection when the light is red. It's not even necessarily against vehicle code to be in an intersection when the light is red for you and green for perpindicular traffic (although it's an imminent hazard, so you better have a good reason).
To show a red light violation, you need a datestamped image showing the vehicle behind the stop line with a red light showing, and a near in time image of it in the intersection on red, and probably another one to show that it didn't make an allowed right on red. Really, you also need evidence that the red light was steady, and not a flashing red light which would indicate four way stop and the driver could proceed after stopping. Typically, you wouldn't see red showing on both directions at the same time in a flashing red situation, but cameras are fickle.
As a nearby Los Angeles resident, I can confirm that a significant percentage, say 30-40%, of drivers 1) don't stop at stop signs, and 2) routinely run red lights at intersections when few or no other vehicles are present. It's true that it's legal to enter an intersection when a light is yellow, but don't let this statement distract from the general traffic-lawlessness that prevails. Law enforcement is even less likely to follow the law (ignoring cases where lights and sirens are activated).
I think the defacto rule that many drivers follow is, 'if the intersection appears clear, I don't have to stop.' (I'm not advocating this rule, just saying what I think the rule is.) Cell phones and screens in cars have made this rule especially problematic because drivers aren't paying close enough attention to the road to ascertain whether intersections are clear.
This isn't a recent phenomenon in LA, but it seems to have increased during and since Covid. I'd love to find reliable data on traffic enforcement. The problem is cultural, but the apparent lack of enforcement seems to have expanded the population of scofflaw drivers.
There is local traffic culture in a lot of places. LA residents in particular don't like stopping at stop signs. Boston drivers turn left immediately when the light turns green even if other cars going the opposite direction have right of way. Texas drivers speed like madmen on freeways. New York drivers change lanes with reckless abandon.
Law enforcement officers in all these places never pull people over for this stuff.
That's false. The stop line for cars is out of frame in the video, and the driver has already passed it by the time the light turns red. You can get a better view of what the intersection actually looks like here: https://maps.app.goo.gl/L37hZyvXs8BeWmFE8
You can not say this without the caveat that it is location dependent. This is an illegal action in some cities and states. Like in California, where that video was taken, yellow means STOP if you can safely do so. Both of these cars had ample time to stop and chose to accelerate to make the light.
This is a solved problem and it's astonishing the world hasn't just adopted the Dutch traffic engineering standards outright. It's FASTER for cars and safer for people.
The lack of adoption of best practices from other countries is generally baffling to me. When I first visited China grim Europe and saw traffic lights with countdowns (like in the US) I thought we did immediately adopt this in Europe. Cultural inertia and lack of looking outwards is really frustrating.
Countdown signals don't work with adaptive signalling where phases are dynamically lengthened or shortened (or sometimes entirely skipped) in response to traffic flows. They especially don't work with public transport priority.
The hard problem isn’t figuring out what to do. Its to get people on board with shifting from a like for like infrastructure development model where the roads and built environment look more or less the same for decades, to a potential status quo changing model of infrastructure development. If you can solve that fundamental issue, traffic is just a footnote of the long list of problems you also solve on our planet.
To clarify, aren't these standards mostly relevant where heavy bicycle traffic exists? Do they still apply in areas with little to no bicycle traffic? I'm assuming you're mostly referring to this famous manual: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CROW_Design_Manual_for_Bicycle...
There is no bicycle traffic because there are no bicycle roads. It's incorrect to claim that we shouldn't build bicycle roads because there's no bicycle traffic :)
HA! I was about to tell my story and checked the article. My story is ONE block away from this intersection.
I used to work a few blocks from this intersection and would walk daily to the train. Crossing the street was daunting, especially when we time changed and it was dark. I started carrying reflective labels on my backback and I wore a strobe light when crossing.
I _still_ had people flipping me off, swerving around me, honking, etc for my audacity to use a crosswalk. Going to remote work probably saved my life.
It's too bad they didn't put a roundabout here, there's one in the middle of old town Orange and it works pretty well. Terrible waste of money to make the intersection worse like they did.
It also says something that the behavior of the cars here isn't even illegal in California. Entering an intersection on yellow and exiting on red is fine. Right turn on red is also allowed, and many people combine that with a California stop (though that last part isn't legal). All of the above are extremely hazardous for pedestrians and encourage speeding.
Usually a crossing will instantly switch when the pedestrian button is pressed, if enough time has passed since the last "walk" cycle.
Having a stage where walk is enabled when there's no pedestrians around wouldn't much help pedestrians, and would introduce inefficiency in throughput. And obviously, drivers can't press a button, so it makes more sense for controls to be accessible to the pedestrians.
Instantly? You're definitely not in North America. Many intersections around me, if you missed pressing the crossing button before parallel street had a green light, you missed your opportunity to walk for the next minute.
> Having a stage where walk is enabled when there's no pedestrians around wouldn't much help pedestrians, and would introduce inefficiency in throughput
It forces drivers to reduce speed and come to a full stop; dramatically decreasing the likelihood of collisions with pedestrians they did not notice.
This is a bad faith framing. The cars are driven by humans. Or in the case of autonomous driving, are driving humans around.
I've come up to plenty of lights that had the pedestrian signal lit even though there were no pedestrians. This happens during the day and at night, and is frustrating. Just happened the other day when I was driving around midnight. Not a pedestrian in sight!
If the designers were truly considering the well-being of the occupants of the vehicles then they would be designing cities to minimize the time spent in vehicles; which means more than saving a few seconds at a stop light, it means getting them out of their cars entirely.
More like voters are on average more likely to be drivers than pedestrians, so politicians favor drivers. In my experience this is even more true for poor voters as they generally can’t afford to live in walkable areas.
Knew before I clicked: it's a flat 4-way intersection of two large-ish streets where there is ample space for something else. Hint: draw a small circle in the middle of the intersection and take down the damn stop signs.
Roundabouts aren't perfect but they greatly reduce the speed of traffic at the crossing point (while increasing the overall throughput of the intersection).
Without looking up statistics (and I'd love to be proven wrong here), I'd be willing to guess that roundabouts may result in some marginal increase in minor accidents but massively reduces fatalities or accidents that leave the pedestrian in the ICU.
Additionally with a roundabout the crossing can be moved a few cars down the street away from the roundabout itself so that cars can have line of sight to safely approach the crossing and pedestrians have time to react to incoming vehicles. On top of that proper placement of crossings allows a normal zebra crossing to be upgraded to a pelican, puffin, or toucan crossing without impeding flow of traffic within the roundabout.
Both as a pedestrian and driver I prefer roundabouts as they force drivers to slow down to non-lethal speeds and there's typically a one car length of road between the turn and pedestrian crossing, so the cars are already going straight when they cross it.
The only road users who don't mix well with roundabouts are cyclists on cycling lanes, as they get in and out of view too fast.
With heavy mixed traffic it's a nightmare for everyone. If pedestrians have the right of way (as they should) and there are a lot of them the whole thing would likely become a permanent traffic jam with almost always one car waiting to turn blocking most of the circle.
Yes. The crossings aren’t solved by the roundabout. But speeds are lowered going into the intersections. The crossings work the same (but may need to move away slightly from the roundabout).
Yes any two streets crossing should ideally either be tiny (like small residential streets where no lights or signs are needed) or only one should be an obvious through street and the other(s) connecting streets. The key is to never have ”grids” of through streets.
We should aim at better drivers rather than better intersections, but bad drivers are everywhere.
Years ago I worked in a building on the side of a long straight road. The road ended with a blind curve to the right and 100m before the blind curve there was a pedestrian crossing.
Even though all drivers knew they would need to brake for the blind curve (it was visible and there were signs) the majority of them used to drive very fast and basically did not let people cross the road, only to push very hard on the brakes 10 meters beyond the pedestrian crossing.
The road design is what causes bad or good driving. The road you describe should narrow before the blind curve so the drivers would (often enough unconsciously) slow down before it. For the pedestrian crossing, small islands that separate the lanes and give pedestrians a safe space will help.
The bright side of roundabouts and (curbs) annd curves is that they create better (more cautious, observing) drivers, with minor consequences (like hitting a curb).
For lowering the high speed, we can also stack roundabouts, curbs (ie diverge and coverage the road).
The other positive of raised curbs is that we can add shrubbery as a natural traffic barrier, and there are some nice safety impacts from this too, such as reduced road runoff / flash flooding - and environmental factors like shade and cooling.
Aside from the debate, 600k seems insanely high for this intersection. No wonder this country's infrastructure is crumbling when it takes over half a million dollars to put in a few lights.
You've got the capital costs of having the several lights, built for 24/7 operation, plus the traffic controller. Then you've got to wire that up, and get an electrical connection for the controller box. Plus all the cuts in the pavement for vehicle detectors. Additionally the pedestrian intend to cross buttons and accessibility indicators for pedestrians. And you may need to resurface before or after, and redraw the lines. Likely you'll need signs. Possibly any other curb work that had been neglected, but needs to be done on a new project.
Plus it costs money to do the traffic survey and analysis to decide if you wanted to build the thing in the first place, and to determine the cycle timings. If you need to run an environmental impact report, that's more money on analysis.
Minimum wage in California seems to be $16 an hour. I doubt this intersection took 37 500 man-hours to finish, so I don't think the cost is explained by wages. Also, $200K would still seem like a gigantic amount of money for adding stop lights to a single intersection.
It's a 34 second video. One enters the intersection after the light has turned red (pause the video, you can see it). The other is half way through the intersection before the light turns red, definitely speeds up to make the light, which is what they're talking about.
think it’s just on the margin - they’re in the intersection in this shot and it’s not illegal (at least where i’m from) to be in the intersection when the light turns red
That, or even use sensors to detect pedestrians coming along that are likely to want to cross, estimate their crossing time based on their walking speed, and make their light turn "go" as soon as they hit the intersection.
Some intersections have exactly this for cars already.
It's very strange to complain that cars run red lights, but somehow not stop signs. I expect that if the intersection were as empty as it was when he was filming, you'd easily find people driving at a similar speed regardless of the stop signs too.
In my own country, where stop signs are relatively rare anyway, this behavior is so common that it doesn't even have a name. I think it's much more unexpected here to see anyone truly stop at a stop sign on an empty street than it is to see them slow down and then continue on. And I would bet police would not bat an eye 99% of the time if they saw someone do it.
The county where I live recently (within the last couple of years) redid a two-way stop along the road I take to work. It used to be east-west that had the stop signs, but for some reason they switched them to north-south. Even more baffling, they didn't repaint the stop lines so east-west still had those and north-south didn't. It effectively turned the intersection into a four-way stop with extra confusion, frustration, and danger.
They eventually turned it into an actual four-way, thankfully. I think everyone would have been happier if they just hadn't messed with it in the first place.
I would love it if roundabouts caught on in the states, at least the single-lane ones. Multi-lane and the huge ones with traffic lights always scared me when driving in the UK.
Cars run stop signs too. They also speed. That’s an enforcement opportunity.
Claiming this makes the intersection less safe despite the engineering studies that were conducted is a claim made without evidence. Pedestrians not having permanent right of way isn’t a safety issue, as the author admits, it’s a convenience issue.
It seems like the author is against cars in principle and uses that bias to complain about something that makes it easier for cars despite having no demonstrable impact on safety.
I live near Barcelona and in the city, stop signs are very rare. Its signals everywhere aside from little low-traffic back streets — and Barcelona is perfectly walkable. Cars are more likely to roll through a four way stop than a red traffic light — especially if they don’t see any conflicting traffic. And at night, stop signs are less safe because you might be pulling out and a pedestrian walks out in front of you — while with traffic signals, it’s clear whose turn it is. Cyclists also seem more prone to ignoring 4-way stops than traffic lights.
Here’s a study from Montreal that, among its other conclusions, showed that signals had no impact on pedestrian-vehicle interactions.
“… the models were unable to demonstrate a significant relationship between stop signs and vehicle–pedestrian interactions. Therefore, drawing conclusions regarding pedestrian safety is difficult.”
> With the change, the light always sits green for drivers on Palm, so cars are now always flying through that street when they previously had to stop at a stop sign. Why don’t lights ever sit idle with the pedestrian crossing on and the cars must wait?
Where I live, this doesn't happen because there's not enough pedestrians to justify it. When I drive in Seattle, the lights never idle, but pedestrian cycles are always included.
With a non-scramble intersection, not including pedestrians by default allows for faster cycling, including for pedestrians that want to cross the alternate way. With a scramble intersection, I'd bet if a pedestrian shows up and pushes the button, an idle green will go yellow immediately. Yes, it's a longer wait than crossing immediately as you would at an idle intersection, but now you can cross diagonally, so that may be a win.
It's worth checking with the traffic engineer to see how they would decide to always include a pedestrian cycle, perhaps during times of high pedestrian use like during hours where students are likely to cross the street between classes.
Too late to edit, but another option which may be too late for this intersection would be to add intend to cross buttons (or other ways of detecting pedestrian intent) farther from the intersection. Many intersections have vehicle detectors farther from the intersection which allows the traffic controller to reduce waiting by lengthening or reducing cycle times in anticipation of traffic that will arrive soon. For example: if there is a dominate traffic direction, the controller can idle at green, and traffic in that direction will often not have to wait. With detectors only at the light, traffic in the opposite direction would need to wait when it arrives; with further back sensors, traffic in the opposite direction can initiate a cycle change earlier and may not need to come to a stop at all. Or cycles in one direction can be lengthened if there is traffic detected at the light and at the further back sensor, which indicates potentially high demand in that direction, especially if the further back sensor stays active which could indicate vehicles are backed up all the way to that sensor. That's less applicable for a pedestrian detector, pedestrian backups are uncommon unless there's an event, at which point it's common to use police/traffic officers to direct traffic or a specialized event mode enabled by a physical control supervised by an officer; but indicators of more pedestrians does justify increasing the pedestrian cycle time.
So he is saying that people are running the red lights but were not running the stop signs. I would bet good money that the people willing to run the red lights would be more likely to run the stop signs than not, especially if they know there are stop signs on the other road.
I don't understand how anyone that actually walks and/or drives in north america can come to that conclusion.
When a driver is speeding up to "make" a yellow light their attention turns to nothing but the yellow light or even worse the state of the next intersection/light beyond the one they are speeding through. The existence of the green/yellow light gives drivers carte blanche to not need to think about the current state of the crossing because "the light tells me there should be nothing there anyways".
Where as a driver slowing down to "roll" a stop sign has their attention set to basically the opposite. They are generally focused on things like, is there a car I'm going to hit? is there a pedestrian crossing? is there a cop down the street waiting to give me a ticket?
Interesting thing here is blinking red for pedestrians before it turns solid red, indicating that you should finish crossing.
In Poland blinking green has the same meaning.
In Berlin and Sydney green for pedestrians is very short and basically lets you enter the crossing. But red doesn't mean you shouldn't be on the crossing. You can take as much time as you need to finish crossing. It feels way better from pedestrian perspective when compared to Polish system where green means you are safe, blinking green means you need to run for your life and red means that drivers can legally run you over and you are about die (they can't but that's how it feels).
> You can take as much time as you need to finish crossing.
Well, up to a certain extent at least. Behind the scenes, German traffic lights for example usually assume you continue walking at 1.2 m/s – if you start crossing at the last possible moment and are slower than that, you will still run into the case where crossing traffic will potentially get a green signal with you still on the road.
Sure, but as a pedestrian you have no way of telling if you took too long so the burden of not hitting you is firmly placed on the drivers.
In Poland it's bit more muddy in drivers' minds. If they hit a pedestrian who was still crossing the road while the light for him was red they think it's partially pedestrian's fault because he shouldn't be there.
I'm not a traffic engineer, but I think making this junction more 'European' would mean one or more of:
- Forbidding on-street parking close to the junction, improving pedestrian visibility.
- Removing the sweeping curves and replacing them with sharp curves, which reduces the speed drivers can turn, and reduces the distance (thus time) pedestrians are in the road.
- Adjusting road priorities
But maybe it's a lost cause. What's described as a "walkable center" in the article seems to be a multi-lane traffic circle with some landscaping surrounded by excessively wide roads and lots of parked cars. I don't see a single pedestrian-only street.
Could someone explain why we always put pedestrian crossings at intersections?
I've always felt like that is the most unsafe place for a crossing. In my city, there are a few pedestrian crossings with lights recessed from intersections. The lights turn on only when someone bumps the crossing button (which isn't super common) and only 2 ways of traffic need to stop/watch out.
The street grid is also where the sidewalks are. Moving crossings away from intersections would mean anyone walking in a straight line has to do a 500ft+ detour every block. They make sense in some specific situations but don't work as a general solution.
1) it makes the travel of a pedestrian going straight become a zig zag where you have to weave into streets that you don't care about. You end up minimizing distance for cars but maximizing distance for pedestrians. It should be the other way around
2) HAWK signals, which are pedestrian buttons affecting lights on pedestrian crossings away from intersections (usually on stroads) have been shown to be worse than nothing because drivers don't really notice them nor the pedestrians (in drivers heads "intersection" equals "watch out for cross traffic, everywhere else it's "go forward and pay attention to the car in front of you"), and pulls some pedestrians to an unwarranted sense of safety.
3) "which isn't super common" tells me that this a very car dependent place. There's a mid block pedestrian light on mission between 1st and 2nd in SF, and there's always someone waiting on it to change. Part of the reason it's there is because there's a straight pedestrian route that allows you to get from Market Street to the terminal.
because drivers generally actually stop at red lights? pedestrian crossings in the middle of the road are typically much less safe in my experience because a considerably proportion of drivers do not yield. i think driving norms in other countries around yielding to crosswalks also seem to be different aka non-existent
My city has those too, and drivers ignore them. Unless you mean one with a proper traffic signal that turns red, ours just turn on yellow flashing lights.
We have both. I agree the yellow flashing ones don't do shit. Even as a driver it can be hard to even see when those lights are flashing which makes them pointless.
I think the real reason this happened is staring the author in the face. He noted the necessary engineering and construction work, and some of the price tags for that and the maintenance. I think this has less to do with any car-friendly ideology, conscious or unconscious, and it's just a boondoggle for engineering, construction, and maintenance firms.
As someone who lives in The Netherlands I basically just don't understand anything about traffic/pedestrian engineering in the USA. I travel to the USA quite frequently and I never quite know what the rules are as a pedestrian.
I've learned to look both ways and move quickly, but I don't have the confidence or assertiveness that I do at home.
Saving seconds for cars is important. It adds up across all the intersections they cross, and makes travel time shorter. These safetyism arguments are tired because they never honestly consider the tradeoffs, particularly that cars have lots of benefits.
Driver and pedestrian are not immutable characteristics. A driver you slow down in one intersection becomes a pedestrian you made more safe and saved time for in another. I agree that analyzing the tradeoffs are important but the broader picture is that in the US' dense urban environments, many of the benefits of cars are that they allow you to avoid pedestrian hostile infrastructure.
The wheel and spokes of a road network should prioritize cars and most urbanists will concede that, but hubs have a wildly different set of constraints. Picking a one-size-fits-all cost to slowing down drivers completely ignores that reality to the detriment of pedestrians and drivers.
This is my take in a nutshell. Instead of trying to force pedestrians and bikers to share with cars, we could go one level better and fully remove pedestrians and bikers from these roads until a city fund for building them a proper bike-only lane has fully matured. The only reason we force them to share public roads is because it seems logical, but the physics and logistics just doesn't work well.
I hate the idea of crosswalks at intersections. I know it's tradition, and why they exist.
But wouldn't it make more sense to have crosswalks in between the intersections? ie: a few hundred feet away from where vehicles are intersecting with each other?
That'd only make sense if your pedestrian network is completely independent from the road network, so pedestrians only need to cross roads, but otherwise never interact with them.
However the usual case is that pedestrians have to walk along the road because there's no separate independent pedestrian network, and in that case not providing crosswalks at intersections forces detours on everybody wanting to walk straight on ahead.
Drivers would have to stop more and they have far more political power than pedestrians so this won’t happen. Many large cities have crosswalks away from intersections and drivers tend to ignore them
"With the change, the light always sits green for drivers on Palm, so cars are now always flying through that street when they previously had to stop at a stop sign"
I used to encounter an infuriating version of this during my commute through SF Mission Bay. There were several lights that clearly were on a timer but wouldn't show the walk signal for pedestrians unless you had pressed the button before the current cycle. In practice this meant that I'd arrive at the intersection that had one or two cars waiting at a red light. This was clearly when I could have gotten a walk signal with no other changes required. However, without the signal I had no idea when it would switch and couldn't walk in front the waiting cars. So I typically ended up waiting till the light turned green for the cars, they drove off and I then crossed as a pedestrian while cars clearly had a green signal but they were gone. I would have had to wait another minute or so for the proper right of way to come around again. Totally bonkers outcome to have to wait for the cars to get a green signal. This would never happen the other way around.
It seems like instead of trying to accommodate cars better, they could have made it worse, so they would avoid that intersection all together, promoting other routes todestinations.
I don't know enough about this particular situation, but I wonder if they considered raised pedestrian curb level roundabouts. They can be much better for things like this.
>The story focuses on a redesign of one intersection in this town. The case highlights how we’ve elevated the value of moving cars quickly at the expense of everything else, even in highly walkable areas.
We should all expect this kind of regressing in walking. Pedestrians and cyclists don't seem to understand how this always will be a car-by-default country due to lifestyle. Yes, there are several cities bucking the trend with exceptions, but those exceptions are either economically able to buck that car-first engineering trend and build massive bike and walking infra or they have exceptional transportation alternatives (train, bus, and subway).
1. NEVER RIDE ON THE SIDEWALK. Cars on the street cannot see you due to other parked cars and WILL make right or left turn on you. Additionaly, cars coming out of parking lots won't see you on the sidewalk.
2. NEVER RIDE ON OPPOSITE SIDE. Ride on the same direction as cars, make yourself visible.
3. INDICATE ALL TURNS WITH HAND SIGNALS. Be predictable. Don't just turn or otherwise behave unpredictably. Indicate turns, make eye contact and then turn.
Nonsense, the money spent on safer roads is an investment on human lives. Infrastructure needs to be rebuilt every few decades and with good planning roads that are being resurfaced anyways can be altered at little extra cost. Finally, let's not ignore that suburban sprawl is economically not viable for cities as the cost per household is higher in sprawl compared to a denser populated area. Changing the last point is obviously the toughest.
It never ceases to amaze me how many (fatal or serious) accidents (of all types in all circumstances) occur due to wanting to save seconds -- not minutes, hours, days, or weeks -- but seconds.
Eh, batching is pretty efficient, whether the traffic is people/cars or digital. I wonder if the other safety issue about running red lights has a baseline for comparison with people running stop signs. I see both happening near me.
As a frequent pedestrian, the question of traffic light vs four-way stop sign depends on the details. Here are some factors:
- In NYC, for example, right turn on red is illegal within the five boroughs (you can always spot NJ drivers you don't know this or don't care). Right turning on red is incredibly dangerous for cyclists and pedestrians, way more than traffic lights vs four-way stop signs;
- How often the light changes is a HUGE factor. I've read that there are some pedestrian crossings in LA at lights that take up to 10 minutes to change. Ridiculous. But in NYC, or at least Manhattan, light changes are quick. I suspect it's designed so a pedestrian never has to wait more than ~45 seconds;
- One way streets are better than two-way streets. There are less variables to be concerned with. Drivers may not like one-way streets. They're demonstrably better for traffic flow, pedestrians and cyclists however;
- Having an island in the middle of a two-way road is HUGELY helpful to both cyclists and pedestrians. The ability to cross halfway in relative safety makes an incredible difference;
- Having separate walk lights for each direction when there is an island is the absolute worst. This typically hugely increases the time to cross as they aren't coordinated;
- The speed limit matters. If the speed limit is under 25, cars rarely go too fast to be a problem. I've had Google Maps street directions that were basically "just make a run for it" across a highway with a speed limit of 45. There are places that say a road has a cycle path that is basically the hard shoulder on an interstate. Drivers will weave through those at 70+ to overtake 1 car. People have died that way;
- Traffic lights can decrease safety because drivers will speed up to make a yellow light. Usually I don't even have to look at a traffic light to tell when it turns yellow. I'll hear the engines revving up. I've nearly been killed this way when a driver accelerated to make what was a red light and they sped through a pedestrian crossing that had signalled pedestrians had right of way. This doesn't tend to happen at four-way stops.
- As a cyclist, I tend to find drivers give you deference at four-way stops but this may depend on the area and if it has a lot of cyclists and pedestrians. I actually prefer to give drivers the right-of-way when they have it. For example, a driver may stop at a four-way stop seeing me coming when they got there first and should just go. And I know I wasn't going fast enough to interfere with them anyway. This forces me to ride in front of them when they have right of way. I never like doing that.
So it's hard for me to judge this particular intersection without knowing the full context.
Please. This is the most drama-queen characterisation of a signal-controlled pedestrian crossing I've ever seen. In fact it's the first time I've seen anyone grinding their teeth at the injustice of a signal-controlled pedestrian crossing.
Hopefully it's not the last. We need to flip the script on cars vs pedestrians, especially since there has been a long history of anti-pedestrian propaganda funded by the automobile industry.
Meanwhile, car-centric environments contribute to air pollution and sedentary lifestyles. They limit public spaces, reducing community interactions and fostering loneliness, while also exacerbating socioeconomic inequalities by obstructing access to jobs and essential services for those unwilling or unable to burn cash on these inefficient, extravagant rolling idols of conspicuous consumption.
Their environmental impact, I shouldn't have to remind you, doesn't end with urban sprawl leading to inefficient land use and loss of green spaces, but includes, of course, plant-rocking CO2 emissions.
So, yeah, I think it's pretty debased that we featherless bypeds have to press a single goddamn button to tread a single square foot of earth in deference to cars.
I'm a pedestrian, and a car driver, and a cyclist and I think this is a reasonable way to control an intersection. Anti-car urbanism is sliding into being a bit of a pseudo-religion for cranks IMO.
I see decisions of the same type being made in the suburbs around here all the time, and the prioritization is identical. I think the issue is suburbanites and small-town folks generally have not experienced a walkable environment and don't understand how pleasant it can be. They are usually ensconced in cars and go isolated from one destination to another without actually touching the community at all.
I was trying to advocate for bike lanes and no-through traffic for a few streets near our small town's historic center a few months ago, and I'm sorry to say, to the community, I think I sounded like a weird European hippy. Even though I'm totally not a hippy and I'm American-born. I'm as capitalist as you can get. But I still think if the state is going to make design decisions on our streets, we should make decisions that make our neighborhoods better and ultimately more inviting and valuable.
The main opposition to what I was proposing was coming from neighborhoods that must commute from further beyond the city center to get to the highway that connects our town to the nearest major city. We have other, faster, wider roads to get to the highway from all parts of our town, but there are people that are adamant that during rush hour, they must be allowed to potentially commute through the historic downtown, and residential neighborhoods, to avoid traffic jams.
I was trying to explain that the bottlenecks are always the main streets that have the highway on-ramps, but to no avail. People like having many potential, fast routes to the highway, and they are deeply uncomfortable with you removing some routes even if they rarely use those routes themselves.
In other words, occasional car use is more important than daily, frequent pedestrian use.
And where were the pedestrians during this town-hall? For whatever reason there were none. Or if there were, they were silent. I was trying to understand why nobody else was speaking up when there are so many bikers, kids, parents with strollers, walkers with dogs, etc., using these streets that will be impacted by bad decision-making, and my conclusion is that young active people, and those with kids, have no time to go to town-halls. And the kinds of people that do go to town-halls are weirdos with design fetishes, like me, and extremely ornery and conservative people who see any change in their town as an assault on the AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE by perverted European-hippy Democratic Degenerates (into which category I have unfortunately been slotted it seems, though I'm embarrassingly capitalist and libertarian).
I would not suggest this will be the median experience in America. My town has a fair number of MAGA lawn signs, American flags, lifted trucks, Punisher stickers, etc., in addition to the tech community. So its a very specific kind of mix. I'm sure those of you in Berkeley or San Francisco will have much better luck.
My community has some of the strangest dynamics you have ever seen.
I think you’re actually describing a pretty normal experience of who goes to those sorts of meetings (people with lots of time on their hands)
It sounds like you’ve possibly already headed down a similar line of reasoning (or possibly read it already) but I’d recommend you check out the book “Strong Towns”. It’s got a ton of overlap with the ideas you’ve brought up.
Police stopped enforcing in my city too. And 10% of drivers know this. People will keeping chipping away at the safety margins until people start dying. Then maybe police will do their job and those 10% of drivers will start worrying about manslaughter charges.
Ironically, the right to privacy was questioned by Alito when he helped nullify Roe v Wade. It will be "interesting" to see what other things we consider private aren't private in the eyes of this court. And even more "interesting" to see the converse.
The core issue is those red light cameras create a persistent database of who is where, which is then sold at a marginal cost to whoever wants it to advertise to/manipulate/track a population. Adding cameras everywhere invites a dystopian nightmare vs better urban design and occasional traffic police would solve the same problem.
As a pedestrian I will take a busy light controlled intersection with a pedestrian scramble type walk signal over a busy 4-way stop where every single time.
With the 4-way stop there is never a time in the cycle when all traffic is stopped. The drivers who are present are continuously paying attention to what other drivers are doing which robs them of situational awareness to note pedestrians. You can try and time it but that's risky. With the walk signal there is a brief moment in time when the drivers are doing nothing but waiting for you and are all stopped so you as a pedestrian can account for them in preparation just before you get your signal and make your move.
The author can get lost with this sort of textbook correct but questionable in reality take. Legally having the right of way doesn't make you any less dead when the driver who's got three other drivers to pay attention to doesn't see you.
This is why it's often safer to "jaywalk". If you're in the middle of a block, you only have to look two ways. Even if you screw up, a driver going at a reasonable speed is more likely to see you anyway because you're directly in front of them. I'm not exactly advocating for crossing in the middle of a street in North America since it's depends a lot on the situation, but there's a reason why people sometimes just do it intuitively, and it's unfortunate our infrastructure doesn't know how to address it.
Jaywalking is very common in the Northeastern US, and I believe it is generally safer when done well. I have a rule that if you don't feel like you can calmly saunter across the street, you shouldn't jaywalk by running across, but many people do not follow such a rule, and just take the soonest opportunity they can find to run across the street.
Be careful, though - I once jaywalked when I was with some friends from the Midwest and they were very offended.
California just made jaywalking legal in 2023 too.
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mid-block crosswalks exist[1] and can placed where people already "jaywalk". To me it's like installing sidewalks on the desire paths[2].
[1]: https://sustainablecitycode.org/brief/mid-block-pedestrian-c...
[2]: https://99percentinvisible.org/article/least-resistance-desi...
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> With the walk signal there is a brief moment in time when the drivers are doing nothing but waiting for you and are all stopped so you as a pedestrian can account for them in preparation just before you get your signal and make your move.
Having almost been hit a few times by drivers making a right turn on red, I can tell you the drivers never wait even if you have the right of way. You'll be lucky if they even look for you.
> Legally having the right of way doesn't make you any less dead when the driver who's got three other drivers to pay attention to doesn't see you.
Also, and I know this is unpopular, but maybe you shouldn't dress like that if you don't want the attention.
Why is right-on-red always cited as the biggest problem with turns? My anecdotal experience is that drivers turning on green are way more likely to hit me when I have a walk signal on the cross-street than drivers who turn right on red.
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Here's how I handle right on red: When I have the walk signal, I look to my left for cars that might be turning right. If there are any, I look at whether the driver sees me. Try to make eye contact. If they are moving and apparently don't see me or are going to turn anyway, I wait. I may have the right of way, but I'm not going to win that battle.
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> Having almost been hit a few times by drivers making a right turn on red, I can tell you the drivers never wait even if you have the right of way. You'll be lucky if they even look for you.
Right on red should not really be allowed. It's a real hazard.
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Right on red is (or should be) never allowed during a pedestrian scramble. That's just asking for trouble. The box must be entirely clear of cars during the walk signal.
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> maybe you shouldn't dress like that if you don't want the attention.
Have you ever taken the selective attention test?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo (short 1:22 video)
>> Legally having the right of way doesn't make you any less dead when the driver who's got three other drivers to pay attention to doesn't see you.
>Also, and I know this is unpopular, but maybe you shouldn't dress like that if you don't want the attention.
in driver's ed you're taught to "drive defensively" i think the same applies to pedestrians. Don't just step into the road when the walk sign comes on, have some situational awareness and protect yourself.
Worse yet, at least in Seattle, are right arrow lights that go green at the same time as the walk light. You get a green light to go and pedestrians start crossing at the same time. Having a green light and a walking sign on should be mutually exclusive.
A pedestrian scramble means that no vehicles should be moving through the intersection period. It is a time in the cycle where ALL vehicles stop, and pedestrians can use the intersection freely in any direction, including diagonally.
You have never had a driver wait?
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This is just not true.
In Toronto for instance, the majority of pedestrian deaths are caused by impaired/distracted drivers with a significant portion of failure to yield by left turning drivers at major, light controlled intersections.
There isn't even a category for "four way stop" pedestrian fatalities.
Speed is nearly everything and controlling (ie. reducing) speed should be the primary way to influence fatality rates.
Having lived in both Toronto and SF, both cities with 4-way stop and controlled lights intersections.
I'll take 4-way stop any day since speeds are lower. Much better to get hit by a car at near zero speed than a right or left turning car at higher speed. Which is probably why Toronto doesn't have a category for four way stop fatalities.
(The worst are SF's 2-way stops at intersections between equally-sized roads that show up randomly throughout Sunset. Worst of both worlds.)
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What you are describing has a major sampling bias: most pedestrian fatalities will be at large intersections with many lanes crossing each other. Those intersections are on busy streets where drivers are going fast and where there are an insane number of conflict points. Yes, they're invariably controlled by a signal, but that's because a four-way stop is totally out of the question. The signal didn't cause the fatalities, it was necessary to install it because of the same factors that lead to fatalities.
Using that data doesn't remotely begin to predict what happens when you take a small four-way stop and add a signal to control it. Adding a signal does not create new conflict points, it does not increase the speed limit on the road, all it does is control the intersection in a more aggressive way.
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> With the 4-way stop there is never a time when all traffic is stopped and the drivers are always paying attention to what other drivers are doing. With the walk signal there is a brief moment in time when the drivers are doing nothing but waiting for you and are all stopped so you as a pedestrian can account for them in preparation just before you get your signal and make your move.
That's... not true? With light traffic a 4 way stop should have no cars at all at it most of the time, leaving pedestrians with the right of way, whereas with a traffic light there will always be a road with priority until a pedestrian hits the button. Requiring cars to pay attention to the condition of the intersection is the explicit design goal.
This was laid out very clearly in the article we just read.
> With light traffic a 4 way stop should have no cars at all at it most of the time
Unless there's protected right turns, of course.
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>That's... not true? With light traffic a 4 way stop should have no cars at all at it most of the time, leaving pedestrians with the right of way, whereas with a traffic light there will always be a road with priority until a pedestrian hits the button. Requiring cars to pay attention to the condition of the intersection is the explicit design goal.
>This was laid out very clearly in the article we just read.
<facepalm>
This is what I mean about theory vs reality.
4-way stops don't look like the animation they show you in driver's ed. In practice what happens is that non conflicting traffic tends to parallelize so someone taking a left might start their left while the person across from them is finishing theirs (or one of any other bunch of combinations) so there's a car in motion basically all the time the situational awareness of every driver who's about to get their turn is mostly absorbed in monitoring who's turn it is and who's going where.
So when you're a pedestrian and you don't time it right you could find yourself starting to cross right before someone wants to drive where you're crossing. Usually this is because you started walking before it was their turn and they didn't notice you until it was their turn and they started moving (because they were accounting for the other traffic) until it was their turn at which point they started looking where they were going as well. Normally this results in absolutely nothing, you speed up a little, they don't gas it as hard, everyone goes on their merry way. But the potential for things to go badly if the conflicting driver is inattentive or further distracted is very much there.
Sure, theoretically the rules say they shouldn't do that but that's not how reality works.
There's just so much less potential for conflict if there is a scheduled time when all the cars stop and then the walking happens. Even without a dedicated walk time it's just so much easier to time it when there's a light because you can start walking when all the cars have red and only have to look out for right on red or potential red light runners, it's a much easier problem than the degree of swiveling your head around you need to do to at a busy 4-way.
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A stat of how many injuries occurred at this intersection would help settle your point. You're talking a lot of theory, where this person seems to have lived and traversed this intersection many times without incident.
Was the upgrade worth $600,000 in this town, this street? And why, if it is a small town with heavy pedestrian traffic, does it default to vehicular movement instead of pedestrian movement?
> The author can get lost with this sort of textbook correct but questionable in reality take
I find this perspective very weird when (1) the "textbook" take (i.e. the one traffic engineers follow) is to almost always prioritize vehicle speed and driver safety over everything else, and (2) in what world is it questionable in reality when it existed in reality for decades, seemingly without incident?
It's not even a textbook correct take. Its less risky to run a stop sign in a clear intersection than to run a red light. There are more people likely to run a stop sign on an empty intersection than a red light.
A 4-way stop is the best intersection for pedestrians in terms of speed. Just keep walking and don't yield your right of way. You may need to put up a hand to make yourself seen by the occasional distracted motorist. But because all vehicles need to stop, the average speed you are dealing with is 0-5mph, so the risk is low and everyone has time to react. Compare that with any lighted intersection where some cars are going full speed, making it a far more dangerous scenario.
I get your point, but still, while the "pedestrian scramble" is maybe good for pedestrian safety, it's probably the worst solution for pedestrian speed. If the pedestrian lights were at least green at the same time with the car light in the same direction, you would at least have a chance of crossing the street without having to wait. This way, the lights never turn green on their own (as seen in the video), so you always have to press a button and wait.
Plus, the author is wrong about both drivers running the red light. YEs, they are pushing the yellow, but they are both legal insofar as the car is over the line when the light turns red.
The first "running the red light" car at 11sec has his/her bumper fully over the white line in the last yellow-light video frame and his wheel fully on the line in the first video frame when the light is red. The second "running the red light car" has the entire car more than half way across the intersection with the light still yellow.
His point still stands that people are rushing to make the light, but it does his point no good to exaggerate like that.
While the 4-way-stop was maybe better for pedestrians, as traffic increased that would degrade.
Overall, it probably would be favorable to fix it in favor of pedestrians instead of vehicles, and to that end they should be narrowing the street and adding close-in trees and obstacles to cue the drivers that it is a much slower zone.
Make it a roundabout with protected pedestrian crossings. That forces drivers to be looking at the conflict point with pedestrians as they manoeuvre the roundabout.
I was very impressed in Denmark, where that roundabout approach worked very well. Every car slowed down & stopped for me at the crosswalks.
It turned out that that was because they installed a cobblestone speed bump in front of every crosswalk. Cars slowed down even if no pedestrians were around, because otherwise they were going to pop a tire. It made walking so much safer than anywhere else I've been.
Those don't fix it in my experience. There's one about a quarter mile from where I'm sitting right now and I avoid it when walking because of how dangerous it is. Yes, they will see you crossing... as they almost hit you. They recently redid it to be a bit safer for driving on (before people were unclear on how many lanes it had and which lanes could turn where) but it doesn't seem to have improved the pedestrian experience much.
in practice i find this does not work well at all… for some reason in roundabouts is when cars most feel justified in running down a pedestrian in a crosswalk. sometimes i think they’re just afraid to slow bc of the cars behind them
This. Roundabouts with medians. The answer is (almost) always roundabouts.
i hate pedestrian scramble systems they make it so slow to walk anywhere
> With the walk signal there is a brief moment in time when the drivers are doing nothing but waiting for you
In my area, there are plenty of stop lights with pedestrian signals where both are active at the same time. This allows the traffic to flow if there are no pedestrians on the assumption the drivers will recognize the pedestrians have right of way. To me, this is bat shit crazy level of assumptions. Either protect the pedestrians, or you might as well remove the pedestrian signal.
> I captured two drivers ripping through red lights in that short span
Video actually shows two cars entering the intersection on yellow lights, which is legal. The rest of the article seems similarly exaggerated.
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Edit: For those who disagree, please be aware that the stop lines are out of frame, so both cars are already in the intersection before they're visible on the video. You can get a better picture of what the intersection actually looks like here: https://maps.app.goo.gl/L37hZyvXs8BeWmFE8
Except the article doesn’t claim what the drivers are doing is illegal.
The article says that the street design causes drivers to speed up and makes the intersections unsafe.
Instead of drivers always stopping, or at the very least slowing down, when approaching the intersection, the new street design leads to drivers speeding up when approaching the intersection.
This is bad design for pedestrians irrespective of whether the driver jumps a light, the pedestrians cross when they shouldn’t be, or neither of them are doing anything wrong.
It will increase the odds of collisions, injuries and possibly fatalities.
> Except the article doesn’t claim what the drivers are doing is illegal.
The article states “… and I captured two drivers ripping through red lights in that short span.” I suppose “ripping through” can be left up to interpretation.
However, in the video the author says “that person just ran a stop… a red light right in the middle of me filming.” Then the other he says: “I bet this guy runs the light. Yup, see, this person ran the light, too.”
“Running” a red light is an illegal act.
I think in both cases the cars should have slowed down and had plenty of time to stop before entering the intersection. But, evidently that’s legal in California, while the author indicates otherwise.
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The video and article specifically said these cars “ran the red light”, which they absolutely did not do.
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I had to look this up. In California in particular, this is true, which surprised me.
Per a random law firm: California’s yellow light law permits drivers to enter an intersection during a yellow light. No violation exists unless any part of the car is over the stopping line when the light turns red. However, the law encourages drivers to slow down before reaching the intersection.
Whereas in, for example, Massachusetts, this would be considered running a red light.
https://www.wccbc.com/red-and-yellow-light-accidents/#:~:tex....
If this surprises you, consider the alternative: Driving through a yellow being illegal or unexpected doesn't make sense, given the finite stopping distance of cars, and reaction time of humans. This is because the yellow light is the first explicit indicator you must stop.
If this doesn't make sense still, picture this scenario: You are driving at the speed limit. You are 500ms from crossing the stop line threshold. The light turns yellow.
Your interpretation would make sense only if there were a (paler yellow?) light warning of the yellow light!
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In the UK, if you're at all over the line when the lights change, you're considered "in the junction" and are expected to leave the junction -- the next phase should give you priority to do so. The only way to run a red light is to start crossing the line while the light is red -- although plenty of drivers will start to inch across while they're supposed to be waiting :P.
The most annoying scenario is where a driver has either stopped or inched forwards far enough that they can't actually see the lights any more and don't know when they've changed.
This is the law in Illinois, too. It, in combination with the way the lights are timed, makes some intersections particularly challenging for pedestrians.
The basic way the timing goes is: traffic light changes, pedestrian crossing signal illuminates, traffic going straight that squeezed in on the yellow finally clears the intersection, cars turning left finally get a chance to go, pedestrian can finally safely enter the intersection with approximately 10 seconds left to cross a four lane street, lights change again, cars start honking at the older person with mobility issues who could only get halfway across the intersection in the time they had available to safely do it, impatient driver from further back in the line who doesn't care to figure out why the person in front hasn't started moving even though the light has been green for five full seconds swerves into the right turn lane and guns it, narrowly missing the aforementioned older person with mobility issues as they blast through the intersection.
I'm wondering how you would know when the yellow light was going to come on.
Do you have some sort of countdown, or innate knowledge?
Because, otherwise do you just randomly stop at green lights guessing that a yellow light might come on? Or do you drive so slowly that you can stop in the width of the white line before a pedestrian crossing? Really, I'm trying to figure out how you don't ever enter just as a light turns yellow. Once you do, do you stop in the intersection or try to clear it before it turns red? I hope the latter.
For me yellow lights are a warning that a red light is coming. It should be long enough for cars to clear the intersection (in many states without gridlock rules even this is not the case for left hand turns).
My experience in Boston is that drivers try to beat the green light change and accelerate while it's still red.
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Just rewatched and agree they both entered on orange, which is legal. This clear misinterpretation makes me question the author's take as a whole. Did they consider that cars also regularly run stop signs? Is it possible that this is, in fact, safer for pedestrians, albeit more frustrating while waiting?
OT, but it fired me up a bit - people that enter the intersection on green or orange awaiting a break to turn left. And then don’t clear the intersection on red. Now they’re in everyone’s way. How do you get them to understand they’ve already “run the light” and just need to move?
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What difference does it make? The main point is that this design induces drivers to speed up even more than they're already speeding (and, this being North America, they're already speeding), at a dangerous point in time when pedestrians are starting to cross. It literally makes no practical difference whether they're entering on a very late yellow or a red.
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Legality aside, is that not kind of the issue here? Lights in a high foot traffic area could incentivize people to speed up to make it before the red, which is less predictable and has cars traveling at faster speeds compared to a stop sign, which requires all cars to stop. Embellished yes, but point of the article showing that this intersection is now more dangerous to pedestrians stands imo.
Using stop lights to control this sort of high-traffic intersection is totally normal in the US. Stop signs are typically used for lower-traffic intersections. Subjectively speaking, I think drivers are more likely to obey a red light than a stop sign.
Perhaps the author of this article is upset that the neighborhood now has more traffic than it used to, but that's a different issue.
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Yellow generally means do not enter the intersection unless you are so close that you cannot reasonably stop. It is not legal to enter the intersection if you cannot clear it before the signal turns red. Exact rules and enforcement vary by state.
> It is not legal to enter the intersection if you cannot clear it before the signal turns red.
That does not appear to be the case in California, which this article is written about. It seems to be a bit confusing, because there are suggestions that the driver handbook suggests that you should follow the rule you note, but that the law itself has no such requirement.
In practice, in many areas of coastal California almost no one would stop at a yellow unless they felt they could not enter the intersection before it turned red, and doing otherwise would likely be seen as impeding traffic by many other drivers.
In CA we have many intersections where one wants to turn left, but there is not a dedicated left turn signal. When the light turns green, you pull out into the intersection. Ideally you pull out enough that the car behind you can also get into the intersection. On busy roads you may not be able to complete the left turn until the signal goes red. If you chose not to pull out, then nobody would ever be able to turn left. I believe CA passed a law some 20 plus years ago that you must be able to clear the intersection before the red light, which is in conflict with what is sometimes necessary. There are situations though where the direction you are headed is backed up, such that if you pulled out you could end up stuck in the middle of the intersection long after the red light. I believe the law was intended for this situation. So don’t pull out if your direction of travel is blocked.
Both may be legal, but the first one is unclear and is definitely unsafe. Safety requirements dictate a slightly different understanding of yellow light than is commonly used by drivers. For safety, yellow must mean "begin controlled deceleration immediately". The first driver had plenty of time on yellow to not be just barely entering the intersection on red. They clearly were not decelerating and had very likely sped up to beat the light. This unquestionably is a thing that drivers do all the time, and it's dangerous.
Why is it dangerous? (Unless they're breaking the speed limit to make the light, obviously.) Just the risk that they might misjudge the timing and enter the intersection after the light turns red? But lights have a built in delay before turning green to account for that.
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This is very much wrong.
When a driver sees a yellow light, they must make a call: do I have time to safely slow down and stop before reaching the stop location, or not? If I do, then I must start slowing down right away - that much we agree o. But if I don't, then I mustn't slow down, as that is more likely to leave me in the middle of the intersection while the lights turn green for through-traffic.
> yellow must mean "begin controlled deceleration immediately"
This is not true in the strong form you used. There is a regime where there is no possibility you will be able to stop the vehicle in time using reasonable deceleration. Slowing does no good. There is also a regime where slowing will cause you to enter the intersection during the red light, and not decelerating will not.
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Again, please be aware that the video does not show the entire intersection.
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The way I learned this was "in legal, out legal," meaning that you are not allowed to be driving in the intersection while the light is red (aka you have to be finished transiting by the time the light changes).
Is this not the law in California?
My understanding is that California has two relevant laws for this discussion:
21453 (a) which prohibits crossing the stop line when the light is red [1]. And 22526 (a) which prohibits entering an intersection when the exit isn't clear. [2]
You have to be able to clear the intersection if you enter it, and you have to enter it on green or yellow (except for turn on red after a stop), but you don't have to clear the intersection before it goes red.
Common practice (which might not be 100% legal) for unprotected lefts on green (where space permits) is for the first car to fully enter the intersection and the second car to roll over the line a bit, then for both vehicles to clear the intersection when opposing traffic stops which may be in yellow or red. The driver that's only a bit in the intersection can make a judgement call and stay slightly encroaching rather than clear the intersection if clearing seems inadvisable because opposing traffic was slow to stop.
[1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio....
[2] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio....
In my state you are allowed to exit the intersection while the light is red but may only enter while it's green or yellow. In driver's ed they taught us to enter the intersection while waiting to make a left turn so that we could complete the turn after the light turned yellow/red and opposing traffic stopped.
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I believe most states it is LEGAL to enter the intersection(normally marked by a white line) before the light turns red.
Cross traffic MUST wait for cars to clear the intersection.
Not only legal, but safer than slamming on one's breaks.
Generally speaking if you're going the speed limit you don't need to "slam on your breaks (sic)" to stop before a light turns red unless you didn't have enough time to clear the intersection anyway.
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I disagree. The first car doesn't even cross their side of the pedestrian crossing before the red light blinks on, so they have had ample time to prepare to stop and are running a red light. The second car is more debatable but also had enough time to stop, as the light turns red while they are still in the middle of the intersection.
The second car definitely entered on yellow. It doesn't matter if they could have stopped. They have the right to enter on yellow.
The first car passed the first line when the light was yellow, but not the second line. The area in between is the crosswalk. I can't tell if "enter the intersection" means "enter any part of the area past the line where you're supposed to stop" or "enter the part past the crosswalk, where the roads actually intersect".
Does anyone know what the rule is?
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I've sometimes wondered what the exact rule is with red lights. Presumably you're allowed to continue moving forwards if the front of your vehicle passed the stop line before the light turned red. But if you stopped with the stop line passing through your vehicle are you allowed to start moving forwards again while the light is red? (Whether that would be a sensible thing to do would depend on whether you're driving a long vehicle with just a tiny part of it behind the stop line, or a motorbike with just a tiny part of it in front of the stop line, but does the law distinguish those two cases?)
I don't think the law is so specific, but I suspect the right interpretation would be that you should pass through the intersection if the car is in a position where it would block other traffic the moment the light turns red; in any other circumstance, you should stop if the light is red, even if you passed the location where you'd normally wait.
For example, say you're entering the intersection on green/yellow, but the car in front suddenly stops while you're on the crosswalk, possibly not even seeing the light on the side of the road, but no part of your car is impeding the cross traffic. Well, even if the car in front now clears the intersection, if the light has turned red, you should almost certainly stop and wait for the next green light, rather than trying to clear the crosswalk: doing anything else is much more dangerous.
If your vehicle is ever fully stopped past the line, and the light is red, that would be considered a “blocking the box” traffic violation in most jurisdictions. You technically should not have entered the intersection at all without the ability to fully clear it.
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Its only me, who think that 12 seconds of green light is just too small window. That's why every car try its best to pass through.
I had the same thought. I've been in places where the first one would supposedly get you a ticket, as you are intended to stop if safely able to do so. It looked like that might have been the case there, though it isn't clear at all.
The second wasn't even close to running the light.
I don't see why a re-design like this wouldn't have included both pedestrian and car infrastructure improvements. Tighten all the turn radii, add bump-outs to each corner, and you could have a signalized intersection that is better than it was before for both.
Freeze frame:
https://imgur.com/a/ASSeakh
> the stop lines are out of frame
Is the car in the freeze frame in a legal position given the red light? It would appear not.
There's no way to know from a single frame. We would need to know the sequence of events.
It's not against California vehicle code to be in an intersection when the light is red. It's not even necessarily against vehicle code to be in an intersection when the light is red for you and green for perpindicular traffic (although it's an imminent hazard, so you better have a good reason).
To show a red light violation, you need a datestamped image showing the vehicle behind the stop line with a red light showing, and a near in time image of it in the intersection on red, and probably another one to show that it didn't make an allowed right on red. Really, you also need evidence that the red light was steady, and not a flashing red light which would indicate four way stop and the driver could proceed after stopping. Typically, you wouldn't see red showing on both directions at the same time in a flashing red situation, but cameras are fickle.
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There is another line before. We don't really see the entire intersection.
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As a nearby Los Angeles resident, I can confirm that a significant percentage, say 30-40%, of drivers 1) don't stop at stop signs, and 2) routinely run red lights at intersections when few or no other vehicles are present. It's true that it's legal to enter an intersection when a light is yellow, but don't let this statement distract from the general traffic-lawlessness that prevails. Law enforcement is even less likely to follow the law (ignoring cases where lights and sirens are activated).
I think the defacto rule that many drivers follow is, 'if the intersection appears clear, I don't have to stop.' (I'm not advocating this rule, just saying what I think the rule is.) Cell phones and screens in cars have made this rule especially problematic because drivers aren't paying close enough attention to the road to ascertain whether intersections are clear.
This isn't a recent phenomenon in LA, but it seems to have increased during and since Covid. I'd love to find reliable data on traffic enforcement. The problem is cultural, but the apparent lack of enforcement seems to have expanded the population of scofflaw drivers.
There is local traffic culture in a lot of places. LA residents in particular don't like stopping at stop signs. Boston drivers turn left immediately when the light turns green even if other cars going the opposite direction have right of way. Texas drivers speed like madmen on freeways. New York drivers change lanes with reckless abandon.
Law enforcement officers in all these places never pull people over for this stuff.
One car enters the intersection on red.
That's false. The stop line for cars is out of frame in the video, and the driver has already passed it by the time the light turns red. You can get a better view of what the intersection actually looks like here: https://maps.app.goo.gl/L37hZyvXs8BeWmFE8
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You can not say this without the caveat that it is location dependent. This is an illegal action in some cities and states. Like in California, where that video was taken, yellow means STOP if you can safely do so. Both of these cars had ample time to stop and chose to accelerate to make the light.
How can you tell both cars had ample time to stop? We didn't see how close they were to entering the intersection in the video.
They entered the intersection on a yellow light, which is perfectly legal if they could not stop.
This is a solved problem and it's astonishing the world hasn't just adopted the Dutch traffic engineering standards outright. It's FASTER for cars and safer for people.
The lack of adoption of best practices from other countries is generally baffling to me. When I first visited China grim Europe and saw traffic lights with countdowns (like in the US) I thought we did immediately adopt this in Europe. Cultural inertia and lack of looking outwards is really frustrating.
Research on countdown traffic lights is inconclusive with regards to their safety [0]. They can not realistically be described as best practice.
[0] https://www.maxapress.com/data/article/dts/preview/pdf/DTS-2...
Countdown signals don't work with adaptive signalling where phases are dynamically lengthened or shortened (or sometimes entirely skipped) in response to traffic flows. They especially don't work with public transport priority.
A countdown on a traffic signal seems like a fun way to encourage drag racing.
Though it's nice on pedestrian signals.
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How are countdown signal better ?
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Which standards are you referring to?
https://swov.nl/en/fact-sheet/principles-safe-road-network (national institute for road safety research)
https://crowplatform.com/product/design-manual-for-bicycle-t... (non-profit advisor to the ministry of transport)
They are literally referring to the "Dutch traffic engineering standards" when they say "Dutch traffic engineering standards"
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The hard problem isn’t figuring out what to do. Its to get people on board with shifting from a like for like infrastructure development model where the roads and built environment look more or less the same for decades, to a potential status quo changing model of infrastructure development. If you can solve that fundamental issue, traffic is just a footnote of the long list of problems you also solve on our planet.
To clarify, aren't these standards mostly relevant where heavy bicycle traffic exists? Do they still apply in areas with little to no bicycle traffic? I'm assuming you're mostly referring to this famous manual: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CROW_Design_Manual_for_Bicycle...
There is no bicycle traffic because there are no bicycle roads. It's incorrect to claim that we shouldn't build bicycle roads because there's no bicycle traffic :)
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HA! I was about to tell my story and checked the article. My story is ONE block away from this intersection.
I used to work a few blocks from this intersection and would walk daily to the train. Crossing the street was daunting, especially when we time changed and it was dark. I started carrying reflective labels on my backback and I wore a strobe light when crossing.
I _still_ had people flipping me off, swerving around me, honking, etc for my audacity to use a crosswalk. Going to remote work probably saved my life.
It's too bad they didn't put a roundabout here, there's one in the middle of old town Orange and it works pretty well. Terrible waste of money to make the intersection worse like they did.
It also says something that the behavior of the cars here isn't even illegal in California. Entering an intersection on yellow and exiting on red is fine. Right turn on red is also allowed, and many people combine that with a California stop (though that last part isn't legal). All of the above are extremely hazardous for pedestrians and encourage speeding.
> Why don’t lights ever sit idle with the pedestrian crossing on and the cars must wait?
The author knows the answer as well as most readers do: because the intersection is being designed with cars in mind, not human beings.
Usually a crossing will instantly switch when the pedestrian button is pressed, if enough time has passed since the last "walk" cycle. Having a stage where walk is enabled when there's no pedestrians around wouldn't much help pedestrians, and would introduce inefficiency in throughput. And obviously, drivers can't press a button, so it makes more sense for controls to be accessible to the pedestrians.
Instantly? You're definitely not in North America. Many intersections around me, if you missed pressing the crossing button before parallel street had a green light, you missed your opportunity to walk for the next minute.
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> Having a stage where walk is enabled when there's no pedestrians around wouldn't much help pedestrians, and would introduce inefficiency in throughput
It forces drivers to reduce speed and come to a full stop; dramatically decreasing the likelihood of collisions with pedestrians they did not notice.
> designed with cars in mind, not human beings
This is a bad faith framing. The cars are driven by humans. Or in the case of autonomous driving, are driving humans around.
I've come up to plenty of lights that had the pedestrian signal lit even though there were no pedestrians. This happens during the day and at night, and is frustrating. Just happened the other day when I was driving around midnight. Not a pedestrian in sight!
If the designers were truly considering the well-being of the occupants of the vehicles then they would be designing cities to minimize the time spent in vehicles; which means more than saving a few seconds at a stop light, it means getting them out of their cars entirely.
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I'm about 99% sure that was a rhetorical question so you can ask yourself why we put cars before people.
People are in cars too.
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Drivers are on average richer than pedestrians.
In America, with our current wealth disparity, that leaves their interests wildly over-represented in policy and infrastructure.
More like voters are on average more likely to be drivers than pedestrians, so politicians favor drivers. In my experience this is even more true for poor voters as they generally can’t afford to live in walkable areas.
Knew before I clicked: it's a flat 4-way intersection of two large-ish streets where there is ample space for something else. Hint: draw a small circle in the middle of the intersection and take down the damn stop signs.
Are you talking about roundabouts? Those are a nightmare for pedestrians
Roundabouts aren't perfect but they greatly reduce the speed of traffic at the crossing point (while increasing the overall throughput of the intersection).
Without looking up statistics (and I'd love to be proven wrong here), I'd be willing to guess that roundabouts may result in some marginal increase in minor accidents but massively reduces fatalities or accidents that leave the pedestrian in the ICU.
Additionally with a roundabout the crossing can be moved a few cars down the street away from the roundabout itself so that cars can have line of sight to safely approach the crossing and pedestrians have time to react to incoming vehicles. On top of that proper placement of crossings allows a normal zebra crossing to be upgraded to a pelican, puffin, or toucan crossing without impeding flow of traffic within the roundabout.
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How so?
Both as a pedestrian and driver I prefer roundabouts as they force drivers to slow down to non-lethal speeds and there's typically a one car length of road between the turn and pedestrian crossing, so the cars are already going straight when they cross it.
The only road users who don't mix well with roundabouts are cyclists on cycling lanes, as they get in and out of view too fast.
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With heavy mixed traffic it's a nightmare for everyone. If pedestrians have the right of way (as they should) and there are a lot of them the whole thing would likely become a permanent traffic jam with almost always one car waiting to turn blocking most of the circle.
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Yes. The crossings aren’t solved by the roundabout. But speeds are lowered going into the intersections. The crossings work the same (but may need to move away slightly from the roundabout).
Better: define one street as the thru street and put a stop or yield on the cross-street.
Yes any two streets crossing should ideally either be tiny (like small residential streets where no lights or signs are needed) or only one should be an obvious through street and the other(s) connecting streets. The key is to never have ”grids” of through streets.
zoom out on the map. There is a big roundabout a couple blocks away. It is called "The Circle In Orange."
We should aim at better drivers rather than better intersections, but bad drivers are everywhere.
Years ago I worked in a building on the side of a long straight road. The road ended with a blind curve to the right and 100m before the blind curve there was a pedestrian crossing.
Even though all drivers knew they would need to brake for the blind curve (it was visible and there were signs) the majority of them used to drive very fast and basically did not let people cross the road, only to push very hard on the brakes 10 meters beyond the pedestrian crossing.
The road design is what causes bad or good driving. The road you describe should narrow before the blind curve so the drivers would (often enough unconsciously) slow down before it. For the pedestrian crossing, small islands that separate the lanes and give pedestrians a safe space will help.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bglWCuCMSWc
The bright side of roundabouts and (curbs) annd curves is that they create better (more cautious, observing) drivers, with minor consequences (like hitting a curb).
For lowering the high speed, we can also stack roundabouts, curbs (ie diverge and coverage the road).
The other positive of raised curbs is that we can add shrubbery as a natural traffic barrier, and there are some nice safety impacts from this too, such as reduced road runoff / flash flooding - and environmental factors like shade and cooling.
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Aside from the debate, 600k seems insanely high for this intersection. No wonder this country's infrastructure is crumbling when it takes over half a million dollars to put in a few lights.
You've got the capital costs of having the several lights, built for 24/7 operation, plus the traffic controller. Then you've got to wire that up, and get an electrical connection for the controller box. Plus all the cuts in the pavement for vehicle detectors. Additionally the pedestrian intend to cross buttons and accessibility indicators for pedestrians. And you may need to resurface before or after, and redraw the lines. Likely you'll need signs. Possibly any other curb work that had been neglected, but needs to be done on a new project.
Plus it costs money to do the traffic survey and analysis to decide if you wanted to build the thing in the first place, and to determine the cycle timings. If you need to run an environmental impact report, that's more money on analysis.
Here's some estimates for component prices https://wbt.dot.state.fl.us/ois/tsmo/TrafficSignalBudgetingC... which I don't think includes installation. Probably $50k to $100k for the hardware, but there's a lot of labor, and engineering time.
This sort of work usually costs 3x what is should, because the firm doing the work has to pay state minimum wage and/or hire union labor.
Minimum wage in California seems to be $16 an hour. I doubt this intersection took 37 500 man-hours to finish, so I don't think the cost is explained by wages. Also, $200K would still seem like a gigantic amount of money for adding stop lights to a single intersection.
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Would it be better if they hired non-union labor at $5/hour (1/3 the minimum wage)? Would you apply for that job?
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the issue is the prevailing wage requirement (3x+ minimum wage). it would be easy to complete this cheaply with just minimum wage labor
This is an annoying change, but the cars in the video weren't actually running any red lights. Doesn't help the case to exaggerate.
It's a 34 second video. One enters the intersection after the light has turned red (pause the video, you can see it). The other is half way through the intersection before the light turns red, definitely speeds up to make the light, which is what they're talking about.
Green state is very short. 15 seconds is barely enough for 2-3 cars. My guess this force drivers to speedup.
Pedestrian "annoyed" by driver, funeral details to follow
https://imgur.com/a/ASSeakh
think it’s just on the margin - they’re in the intersection in this shot and it’s not illegal (at least where i’m from) to be in the intersection when the light turns red
That triangle doesn't mark the stop line though, it's further back. If cars stopped at the triangle they would block pedestrians crossing the street.
"pedestrians have to press the beg button, wait for the light to cycle through its routine, and then walk across the street"
Quite often what happens is
- Pedestrian presses button
- Light doesn't change for 30 seconds and there are no cars in sight
- Pedestrian goes "fuck it" and crosses
- Light changes red, after pedestrian is done crossing
- Car comes along and gets stopped at red light for 30 seconds
I wonder why these buttons don't immediately allow pedestrians to cross (maybe with some rate limiting to avoid abuse).
That, or even use sensors to detect pedestrians coming along that are likely to want to cross, estimate their crossing time based on their walking speed, and make their light turn "go" as soon as they hit the intersection.
Some intersections have exactly this for cars already.
It's very strange to complain that cars run red lights, but somehow not stop signs. I expect that if the intersection were as empty as it was when he was filming, you'd easily find people driving at a similar speed regardless of the stop signs too.
My experience has been that cars will happily roll through stop signs, but at nowhere near full speed like they're doing here.
I know it as the "California Roll" - to slow down but continue to cruise through stop signs.
In my own country, where stop signs are relatively rare anyway, this behavior is so common that it doesn't even have a name. I think it's much more unexpected here to see anyone truly stop at a stop sign on an empty street than it is to see them slow down and then continue on. And I would bet police would not bat an eye 99% of the time if they saw someone do it.
That's old fashioned, the current "California roll" is to just continue at full speed through stop signs or red lights.
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The county where I live recently (within the last couple of years) redid a two-way stop along the road I take to work. It used to be east-west that had the stop signs, but for some reason they switched them to north-south. Even more baffling, they didn't repaint the stop lines so east-west still had those and north-south didn't. It effectively turned the intersection into a four-way stop with extra confusion, frustration, and danger.
They eventually turned it into an actual four-way, thankfully. I think everyone would have been happier if they just hadn't messed with it in the first place.
should've been a roundabout with 0 stops
Roundabouts aren't great for pedestrians. You need to trust the drivers' signals.
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I would love it if roundabouts caught on in the states, at least the single-lane ones. Multi-lane and the huge ones with traffic lights always scared me when driving in the UK.
Very generally, if it is a busy place I actually prefer a highly controlled intersection with clear lights and signs vs 4 way stops.
I've had way more problems at 4 way stops than intersections controlled by lights.
Cars run stop signs too. They also speed. That’s an enforcement opportunity.
Claiming this makes the intersection less safe despite the engineering studies that were conducted is a claim made without evidence. Pedestrians not having permanent right of way isn’t a safety issue, as the author admits, it’s a convenience issue.
It seems like the author is against cars in principle and uses that bias to complain about something that makes it easier for cars despite having no demonstrable impact on safety.
I live near Barcelona and in the city, stop signs are very rare. Its signals everywhere aside from little low-traffic back streets — and Barcelona is perfectly walkable. Cars are more likely to roll through a four way stop than a red traffic light — especially if they don’t see any conflicting traffic. And at night, stop signs are less safe because you might be pulling out and a pedestrian walks out in front of you — while with traffic signals, it’s clear whose turn it is. Cyclists also seem more prone to ignoring 4-way stops than traffic lights.
Here’s a study from Montreal that, among its other conclusions, showed that signals had no impact on pedestrian-vehicle interactions.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00224...
“… the models were unable to demonstrate a significant relationship between stop signs and vehicle–pedestrian interactions. Therefore, drawing conclusions regarding pedestrian safety is difficult.”
> With the change, the light always sits green for drivers on Palm, so cars are now always flying through that street when they previously had to stop at a stop sign. Why don’t lights ever sit idle with the pedestrian crossing on and the cars must wait?
Where I live, this doesn't happen because there's not enough pedestrians to justify it. When I drive in Seattle, the lights never idle, but pedestrian cycles are always included.
With a non-scramble intersection, not including pedestrians by default allows for faster cycling, including for pedestrians that want to cross the alternate way. With a scramble intersection, I'd bet if a pedestrian shows up and pushes the button, an idle green will go yellow immediately. Yes, it's a longer wait than crossing immediately as you would at an idle intersection, but now you can cross diagonally, so that may be a win.
It's worth checking with the traffic engineer to see how they would decide to always include a pedestrian cycle, perhaps during times of high pedestrian use like during hours where students are likely to cross the street between classes.
Too late to edit, but another option which may be too late for this intersection would be to add intend to cross buttons (or other ways of detecting pedestrian intent) farther from the intersection. Many intersections have vehicle detectors farther from the intersection which allows the traffic controller to reduce waiting by lengthening or reducing cycle times in anticipation of traffic that will arrive soon. For example: if there is a dominate traffic direction, the controller can idle at green, and traffic in that direction will often not have to wait. With detectors only at the light, traffic in the opposite direction would need to wait when it arrives; with further back sensors, traffic in the opposite direction can initiate a cycle change earlier and may not need to come to a stop at all. Or cycles in one direction can be lengthened if there is traffic detected at the light and at the further back sensor, which indicates potentially high demand in that direction, especially if the further back sensor stays active which could indicate vehicles are backed up all the way to that sensor. That's less applicable for a pedestrian detector, pedestrian backups are uncommon unless there's an event, at which point it's common to use police/traffic officers to direct traffic or a specialized event mode enabled by a physical control supervised by an officer; but indicators of more pedestrians does justify increasing the pedestrian cycle time.
So he is saying that people are running the red lights but were not running the stop signs. I would bet good money that the people willing to run the red lights would be more likely to run the stop signs than not, especially if they know there are stop signs on the other road.
People usually slow down to run stop signs, but speed up to run red lights.
I don't understand how anyone that actually walks and/or drives in north america can come to that conclusion.
When a driver is speeding up to "make" a yellow light their attention turns to nothing but the yellow light or even worse the state of the next intersection/light beyond the one they are speeding through. The existence of the green/yellow light gives drivers carte blanche to not need to think about the current state of the crossing because "the light tells me there should be nothing there anyways".
Where as a driver slowing down to "roll" a stop sign has their attention set to basically the opposite. They are generally focused on things like, is there a car I'm going to hit? is there a pedestrian crossing? is there a cop down the street waiting to give me a ticket?
Interesting thing here is blinking red for pedestrians before it turns solid red, indicating that you should finish crossing.
In Poland blinking green has the same meaning.
In Berlin and Sydney green for pedestrians is very short and basically lets you enter the crossing. But red doesn't mean you shouldn't be on the crossing. You can take as much time as you need to finish crossing. It feels way better from pedestrian perspective when compared to Polish system where green means you are safe, blinking green means you need to run for your life and red means that drivers can legally run you over and you are about die (they can't but that's how it feels).
> You can take as much time as you need to finish crossing.
Well, up to a certain extent at least. Behind the scenes, German traffic lights for example usually assume you continue walking at 1.2 m/s – if you start crossing at the last possible moment and are slower than that, you will still run into the case where crossing traffic will potentially get a green signal with you still on the road.
Thanks for clarification.
Sure, but as a pedestrian you have no way of telling if you took too long so the burden of not hitting you is firmly placed on the drivers.
In Poland it's bit more muddy in drivers' minds. If they hit a pedestrian who was still crossing the road while the light for him was red they think it's partially pedestrian's fault because he shouldn't be there.
I'm not a traffic engineer, but I think making this junction more 'European' would mean one or more of:
- Forbidding on-street parking close to the junction, improving pedestrian visibility.
- Removing the sweeping curves and replacing them with sharp curves, which reduces the speed drivers can turn, and reduces the distance (thus time) pedestrians are in the road.
- Adjusting road priorities
But maybe it's a lost cause. What's described as a "walkable center" in the article seems to be a multi-lane traffic circle with some landscaping surrounded by excessively wide roads and lots of parked cars. I don't see a single pedestrian-only street.
Could someone explain why we always put pedestrian crossings at intersections?
I've always felt like that is the most unsafe place for a crossing. In my city, there are a few pedestrian crossings with lights recessed from intersections. The lights turn on only when someone bumps the crossing button (which isn't super common) and only 2 ways of traffic need to stop/watch out.
The street grid is also where the sidewalks are. Moving crossings away from intersections would mean anyone walking in a straight line has to do a 500ft+ detour every block. They make sense in some specific situations but don't work as a general solution.
1) it makes the travel of a pedestrian going straight become a zig zag where you have to weave into streets that you don't care about. You end up minimizing distance for cars but maximizing distance for pedestrians. It should be the other way around
2) HAWK signals, which are pedestrian buttons affecting lights on pedestrian crossings away from intersections (usually on stroads) have been shown to be worse than nothing because drivers don't really notice them nor the pedestrians (in drivers heads "intersection" equals "watch out for cross traffic, everywhere else it's "go forward and pay attention to the car in front of you"), and pulls some pedestrians to an unwarranted sense of safety.
3) "which isn't super common" tells me that this a very car dependent place. There's a mid block pedestrian light on mission between 1st and 2nd in SF, and there's always someone waiting on it to change. Part of the reason it's there is because there's a straight pedestrian route that allows you to get from Market Street to the terminal.
because drivers generally actually stop at red lights? pedestrian crossings in the middle of the road are typically much less safe in my experience because a considerably proportion of drivers do not yield. i think driving norms in other countries around yielding to crosswalks also seem to be different aka non-existent
My city has those too, and drivers ignore them. Unless you mean one with a proper traffic signal that turns red, ours just turn on yellow flashing lights.
We have both. I agree the yellow flashing ones don't do shit. Even as a driver it can be hard to even see when those lights are flashing which makes them pointless.
The overhead red, though, works great.
That’s where the stop lights are.
Example of an insideously unsafe intersection that was changed to make it safer (for bike riders):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYeeTvitvFU
How it was fixed:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpgpE6wjF30
I think the real reason this happened is staring the author in the face. He noted the necessary engineering and construction work, and some of the price tags for that and the maintenance. I think this has less to do with any car-friendly ideology, conscious or unconscious, and it's just a boondoggle for engineering, construction, and maintenance firms.
As someone who lives in The Netherlands I basically just don't understand anything about traffic/pedestrian engineering in the USA. I travel to the USA quite frequently and I never quite know what the rules are as a pedestrian.
I've learned to look both ways and move quickly, but I don't have the confidence or assertiveness that I do at home.
Saving seconds for cars is important. It adds up across all the intersections they cross, and makes travel time shorter. These safetyism arguments are tired because they never honestly consider the tradeoffs, particularly that cars have lots of benefits.
Driver and pedestrian are not immutable characteristics. A driver you slow down in one intersection becomes a pedestrian you made more safe and saved time for in another. I agree that analyzing the tradeoffs are important but the broader picture is that in the US' dense urban environments, many of the benefits of cars are that they allow you to avoid pedestrian hostile infrastructure.
The wheel and spokes of a road network should prioritize cars and most urbanists will concede that, but hubs have a wildly different set of constraints. Picking a one-size-fits-all cost to slowing down drivers completely ignores that reality to the detriment of pedestrians and drivers.
This is my take in a nutshell. Instead of trying to force pedestrians and bikers to share with cars, we could go one level better and fully remove pedestrians and bikers from these roads until a city fund for building them a proper bike-only lane has fully matured. The only reason we force them to share public roads is because it seems logical, but the physics and logistics just doesn't work well.
> and fully remove pedestrians and bikers from these roads until a city fund for building them a proper bike-only lane has fully matured.
And what do the pedestrians get?
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I hate the idea of crosswalks at intersections. I know it's tradition, and why they exist.
But wouldn't it make more sense to have crosswalks in between the intersections? ie: a few hundred feet away from where vehicles are intersecting with each other?
That'd only make sense if your pedestrian network is completely independent from the road network, so pedestrians only need to cross roads, but otherwise never interact with them.
However the usual case is that pedestrians have to walk along the road because there's no separate independent pedestrian network, and in that case not providing crosswalks at intersections forces detours on everybody wanting to walk straight on ahead.
Drivers would have to stop more and they have far more political power than pedestrians so this won’t happen. Many large cities have crosswalks away from intersections and drivers tend to ignore them
We have the technology to cheaply enforce most driving laws. IMO we should do it.
"With the change, the light always sits green for drivers on Palm, so cars are now always flying through that street when they previously had to stop at a stop sign"
I used to encounter an infuriating version of this during my commute through SF Mission Bay. There were several lights that clearly were on a timer but wouldn't show the walk signal for pedestrians unless you had pressed the button before the current cycle. In practice this meant that I'd arrive at the intersection that had one or two cars waiting at a red light. This was clearly when I could have gotten a walk signal with no other changes required. However, without the signal I had no idea when it would switch and couldn't walk in front the waiting cars. So I typically ended up waiting till the light turned green for the cars, they drove off and I then crossed as a pedestrian while cars clearly had a green signal but they were gone. I would have had to wait another minute or so for the proper right of way to come around again. Totally bonkers outcome to have to wait for the cars to get a green signal. This would never happen the other way around.
It seems like instead of trying to accommodate cars better, they could have made it worse, so they would avoid that intersection all together, promoting other routes todestinations.
I don't know enough about this particular situation, but I wonder if they considered raised pedestrian curb level roundabouts. They can be much better for things like this.
>The story focuses on a redesign of one intersection in this town. The case highlights how we’ve elevated the value of moving cars quickly at the expense of everything else, even in highly walkable areas.
We should all expect this kind of regressing in walking. Pedestrians and cyclists don't seem to understand how this always will be a car-by-default country due to lifestyle. Yes, there are several cities bucking the trend with exceptions, but those exceptions are either economically able to buck that car-first engineering trend and build massive bike and walking infra or they have exceptional transportation alternatives (train, bus, and subway).
You think pedestrians and cyclists don't realize how car dominant we are?
Correct. They expect safe walking and biking infra to fall from the sky and complain online when it does not.
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I'm literally just trying to stop drivers from killing my kids when they bike to school.
Some "lifestyle".
The way you make your kids safe bikers:
1. NEVER RIDE ON THE SIDEWALK. Cars on the street cannot see you due to other parked cars and WILL make right or left turn on you. Additionaly, cars coming out of parking lots won't see you on the sidewalk.
2. NEVER RIDE ON OPPOSITE SIDE. Ride on the same direction as cars, make yourself visible.
3. INDICATE ALL TURNS WITH HAND SIGNALS. Be predictable. Don't just turn or otherwise behave unpredictably. Indicate turns, make eye contact and then turn.
4. (Obvious) ACT LIKE A CAR AND DON'T RUN LIGHTS.
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"Whether car, scooter, bike, or feet, look both ways before crossing a street"
Nonsense, the money spent on safer roads is an investment on human lives. Infrastructure needs to be rebuilt every few decades and with good planning roads that are being resurfaced anyways can be altered at little extra cost. Finally, let's not ignore that suburban sprawl is economically not viable for cities as the cost per household is higher in sprawl compared to a denser populated area. Changing the last point is obviously the toughest.
https://cayimby.org/blog/sprawl-costs-the-u-s-1-trillion-eve... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmQomKCfYZY
Huh, is that a diagonal crosswalk? I've never seen that before... does that actually cause a 4 way stop for all cars for pedestrians?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedestrian_scramble
The placement of the traffic lights behind the intersection, and not in front of it, is just hilariously incompetent.
It never ceases to amaze me how many (fatal or serious) accidents (of all types in all circumstances) occur due to wanting to save seconds -- not minutes, hours, days, or weeks -- but seconds.
Eh, batching is pretty efficient, whether the traffic is people/cars or digital. I wonder if the other safety issue about running red lights has a baseline for comparison with people running stop signs. I see both happening near me.
As a frequent pedestrian, the question of traffic light vs four-way stop sign depends on the details. Here are some factors:
- In NYC, for example, right turn on red is illegal within the five boroughs (you can always spot NJ drivers you don't know this or don't care). Right turning on red is incredibly dangerous for cyclists and pedestrians, way more than traffic lights vs four-way stop signs;
- How often the light changes is a HUGE factor. I've read that there are some pedestrian crossings in LA at lights that take up to 10 minutes to change. Ridiculous. But in NYC, or at least Manhattan, light changes are quick. I suspect it's designed so a pedestrian never has to wait more than ~45 seconds;
- One way streets are better than two-way streets. There are less variables to be concerned with. Drivers may not like one-way streets. They're demonstrably better for traffic flow, pedestrians and cyclists however;
- Having an island in the middle of a two-way road is HUGELY helpful to both cyclists and pedestrians. The ability to cross halfway in relative safety makes an incredible difference;
- Having separate walk lights for each direction when there is an island is the absolute worst. This typically hugely increases the time to cross as they aren't coordinated;
- The speed limit matters. If the speed limit is under 25, cars rarely go too fast to be a problem. I've had Google Maps street directions that were basically "just make a run for it" across a highway with a speed limit of 45. There are places that say a road has a cycle path that is basically the hard shoulder on an interstate. Drivers will weave through those at 70+ to overtake 1 car. People have died that way;
- Traffic lights can decrease safety because drivers will speed up to make a yellow light. Usually I don't even have to look at a traffic light to tell when it turns yellow. I'll hear the engines revving up. I've nearly been killed this way when a driver accelerated to make what was a red light and they sped through a pedestrian crossing that had signalled pedestrians had right of way. This doesn't tend to happen at four-way stops.
- As a cyclist, I tend to find drivers give you deference at four-way stops but this may depend on the area and if it has a lot of cyclists and pedestrians. I actually prefer to give drivers the right-of-way when they have it. For example, a driver may stop at a four-way stop seeing me coming when they got there first and should just go. And I know I wasn't going fast enough to interfere with them anyway. This forces me to ride in front of them when they have right of way. I never like doing that.
So it's hard for me to judge this particular intersection without knowing the full context.
> pedestrians have to press the beg button
Please. This is the most drama-queen characterisation of a signal-controlled pedestrian crossing I've ever seen. In fact it's the first time I've seen anyone grinding their teeth at the injustice of a signal-controlled pedestrian crossing.
Hopefully it's not the last. We need to flip the script on cars vs pedestrians, especially since there has been a long history of anti-pedestrian propaganda funded by the automobile industry.
Meanwhile, car-centric environments contribute to air pollution and sedentary lifestyles. They limit public spaces, reducing community interactions and fostering loneliness, while also exacerbating socioeconomic inequalities by obstructing access to jobs and essential services for those unwilling or unable to burn cash on these inefficient, extravagant rolling idols of conspicuous consumption.
Their environmental impact, I shouldn't have to remind you, doesn't end with urban sprawl leading to inefficient land use and loss of green spaces, but includes, of course, plant-rocking CO2 emissions.
So, yeah, I think it's pretty debased that we featherless bypeds have to press a single goddamn button to tread a single square foot of earth in deference to cars.
I'm a pedestrian, and a car driver, and a cyclist and I think this is a reasonable way to control an intersection. Anti-car urbanism is sliding into being a bit of a pseudo-religion for cranks IMO.
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I see decisions of the same type being made in the suburbs around here all the time, and the prioritization is identical. I think the issue is suburbanites and small-town folks generally have not experienced a walkable environment and don't understand how pleasant it can be. They are usually ensconced in cars and go isolated from one destination to another without actually touching the community at all.
I was trying to advocate for bike lanes and no-through traffic for a few streets near our small town's historic center a few months ago, and I'm sorry to say, to the community, I think I sounded like a weird European hippy. Even though I'm totally not a hippy and I'm American-born. I'm as capitalist as you can get. But I still think if the state is going to make design decisions on our streets, we should make decisions that make our neighborhoods better and ultimately more inviting and valuable.
The main opposition to what I was proposing was coming from neighborhoods that must commute from further beyond the city center to get to the highway that connects our town to the nearest major city. We have other, faster, wider roads to get to the highway from all parts of our town, but there are people that are adamant that during rush hour, they must be allowed to potentially commute through the historic downtown, and residential neighborhoods, to avoid traffic jams.
I was trying to explain that the bottlenecks are always the main streets that have the highway on-ramps, but to no avail. People like having many potential, fast routes to the highway, and they are deeply uncomfortable with you removing some routes even if they rarely use those routes themselves.
In other words, occasional car use is more important than daily, frequent pedestrian use.
And where were the pedestrians during this town-hall? For whatever reason there were none. Or if there were, they were silent. I was trying to understand why nobody else was speaking up when there are so many bikers, kids, parents with strollers, walkers with dogs, etc., using these streets that will be impacted by bad decision-making, and my conclusion is that young active people, and those with kids, have no time to go to town-halls. And the kinds of people that do go to town-halls are weirdos with design fetishes, like me, and extremely ornery and conservative people who see any change in their town as an assault on the AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE by perverted European-hippy Democratic Degenerates (into which category I have unfortunately been slotted it seems, though I'm embarrassingly capitalist and libertarian).
I would not suggest this will be the median experience in America. My town has a fair number of MAGA lawn signs, American flags, lifted trucks, Punisher stickers, etc., in addition to the tech community. So its a very specific kind of mix. I'm sure those of you in Berkeley or San Francisco will have much better luck.
My community has some of the strangest dynamics you have ever seen.
I think you’re actually describing a pretty normal experience of who goes to those sorts of meetings (people with lots of time on their hands)
It sounds like you’ve possibly already headed down a similar line of reasoning (or possibly read it already) but I’d recommend you check out the book “Strong Towns”. It’s got a ton of overlap with the ideas you’ve brought up.
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> Drivers now do not want to get stuck at the light, so they are consistently running red lights
Police stopped enforcing red lights all over California after covid. And getting cameras installed is a Herculean task.
Police stopped enforcing in my city too. And 10% of drivers know this. People will keeping chipping away at the safety margins until people start dying. Then maybe police will do their job and those 10% of drivers will start worrying about manslaughter charges.
The Texas government decided that red light cameras can't enforce the law. That's how car-brained we are.
Muh privacy or something.
Ironically, the right to privacy was questioned by Alito when he helped nullify Roe v Wade. It will be "interesting" to see what other things we consider private aren't private in the eyes of this court. And even more "interesting" to see the converse.
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The core issue is those red light cameras create a persistent database of who is where, which is then sold at a marginal cost to whoever wants it to advertise to/manipulate/track a population. Adding cameras everywhere invites a dystopian nightmare vs better urban design and occasional traffic police would solve the same problem.
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