Here’s an update on the last Piece of Cake post (#2). Recall there are several intersections around town where pedestrians are held back by a ‘red man’ when there is no actual vehicle movement conflict. Particularly bad examples can be found at Victoria/High Streets and Symonds/Alfred Streets, and reader mm suggested an additional one at Broadway and Mortimer Place in Newmarket.
Since I figured this problem was so easy-peasy, I logged a call with AT via their twitter account @AklTransport and pointed them to my blog post. A few days later a friendly person called and asked me to describe the problem in more detail. The issue, according to AT, is not so easy to fix. These intersections (at least the Symonds and Victoria Street ones) have an “exclusive pedestrian phase” which means that they also can’t have unique mid-phasing cycles that allow people to cross in one direction. This decision is based on previous situations where mixed signal phasing patterns have introduced safety issues.
This seems like a reasonable and logical consideration based most likely on a major intersection like Queen Street. The problem I have is using this rule and applying it to unique circumstances. The most obvious distinction with these cases is the one-way street. Also, the side streets are more like lanes than streets. So we are left with a design that treats people like idiots and ultimately forces them to ignore the signals.
Not to be deterred here is Piece of Cake #3. I’m sure there are plenty of reasons why these are also “too hard.”
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Assuming you are talking about this particular intersection as you #3, you’ll be pleased to know that I have initiated works at this particular intersection (Bowen Ave, Kitchener, Victoria Streets) to get a pedestrian facility installed from the (coming down Bowen towards the city) right hand side of the Bowen Ave footpath, across to Kitchener St. This will create safer pedestrian routes and cater to the increased numbers of pedestrians in the city.
Auckland Transport are currently in the design stage, with works likely to be carried out in the last quarter of the year.
Christopher Dempsey
Waitemata Local Board.
Hi Christopher, that is great news! One down…
No worries. What’s up next?
The top end of Kitchener/ Bowen where it intersects with Princes and Waterloo Quadrant 🙂
Yes this intersection desperately needs a barnes dance, at present you have to cross around 4 roads when crossing from the eastern side of princess street to the uni.
Yes, the Uni traffic is immense in this area, but apparently, not a priority. Not sure if a Barnes Dance would be best since there is not a whole lot of diagonal movement. Would be a fun puzzle to sort out.
Christopher, when walking along the footpath on the west side of Beaumont St it takes me 5:37 to cross from near Victory Church to the Opus Building from the time I push the first button to the time I get to the other side.
The pedestrian crossing controls at the intersection are quite weird, the first one where you cross in front of traffic waiting to turn onto the motorway (http://goo.gl/maps/ZMSXT), when you push the button when the traffic light for motorway traffic is red gives you a green man immediately, then a red flashing man, then no man. Pushing the button again gives you another green man. Why don’t they just leave the green man on for the entire phase?
Then it takes two more phases to get over Fanshawe St (http://goo.gl/maps/mdreo), even though there is enough time to cross the entire road, so lots of people just ignore the red man and walk in traffic on the north side that is at a red light. The pedestrian crossing on the north side of Fanshawe St should be a green man for almost all of the time that the traffic coming off the motorway has a red light.
Thanks, I will forward your comments onto AT for their input.
Brendan, that is a NZTA intersection. The crossing isn’t weird at all. If it were to stay green all the time, then the visually impaired wouldn’t know whether it were safe to cross and you can have the beeper going off constantly. Not sure on the stagger crossing as Im not familiar with the phasing.
As a end user, I don’t really care if it is an AT intersection or a NZTA intersection, I just want to walk from one side of the road to the other sooner. (Doesn’t the motorway start to the west of the intersection, so this should be an AT intersection?)
Surely any intersection that takes over five minutes for pedestrians to get to one side of the road to the other is a fail, and should be reviewed to see if it could be optimized.
There are cases where traffic turning from Beaumont St onto the motorway have a red light and a red man is shown, and when traffic coming off the motorway onto Fanshawe St have a red light and a red man is shown. In both these cases, it should be a green man (except for the last few seconds when there should be a red flashing man).
If you observe current practice, many pedestrians have figured out these optimizations by them selves and just walk in front of traffic that have a red light when the red man is showing, which indicates the current configuration is failing.
As for visually impaired people, wouldn’t best practice at every intersection be to have the buzzer go off when the button is pressed and the green man is currently showing? Otherwise, if they got to the crossing a few seconds late they wouldn’t know about the green man, but non-impaired people would.
I am pretty sure this is a Piece of Cake idea, but will need NZTA to make the changes; not Auckland Transport. My idea is that the Pedestrian lights need to change. At the moment the phase is like this: Red Man, Green Man, Flashing Red Man, and then Red Man again. This sequence basically tells pedestrians that once the Red Man starts flashing, you gotta get off the road. You end up with pedestrians scrambling to get off the road, and give the power back to vehicles.
This needs to change to Red Man, Green Man, Flashing Green Man, and then the Red Man again. I believe this will provide a psychological shift. Once the Green Man is flashing, no longer can vehicles assume they own the road. The light is still green in the pedestrians’ favour; but it is disappearing, so there is limited time left. This tells pedestrians that they still have the right to use the crossing. Cars should not be allowed to cross this until the light goes red.
A piece of cake?
Definetely Daniel. Flashing green man is more appropriate for “continue to cross the road if you have already started, but don’t start to cross”. Flashing red means “panic, stop, don’t move, crisis” in most contexts.
How do the ‘countdown’ signals fit in to this? They are quite popular on major intersections but seem to work well enough to work elsewhere too. No flashing man at all 🙂
Well thats probably the better option, just roll those out to all crossings. The green man could be a simple software fix however.
Countdown signals apparently have mixed impacts, based from what I casually read in the summary of an assessment of their use on Queen Street – some people actively use the count-down timer to dash across, “knowing” they have just enough time.
What’s wrong with that? If you’ve got time to cross, why not cross?
Isn’t that the point Starnius?!
The point is that the countdown is supposed to give you enough time to safely clear the intersection. However, some people “aim for the last second” once they have a counter, running across when previously, they would hesitate and hold off entering the intersection because they didn’t know how much time was left.
So?
Better still countdown signals that also tell pedestrians how long they have to wait for the green. Seen them in Denmark; they’re really civilised in the sense that they don’t reinforce the idea that pedestrians are third rate users of public ways which is what you get in Auckland. I had a traffic engineer tell me the other day that AT refuse to make things better for pedestrians ‘because there aren’t the numbers’. Unsurprising really when you consider that AT and its predecessors have been running an aggressively anti-pedestrian strategy for the past fifty or so odd years so that more cars can go faster.
One thing I’d like to see is a rule change that finally applies give way rules to cars and pedestrians outside marked crossings. Cars would be required to give way to pedestrians when the car is A. at a give-way or stop sign, or B. turning. It doesn’t require any physical works AFAICT, but it would need a law change and education campaign.
Looks like our local board has been listening. See on page 4 of the notes from the April 16, 2013 meeting:
Resolution number WTM/2013/95
MOVED by Member S Chambers, seconded Member JC Chalmers:
b) That the Waitemata Local Board:
i) adds or amends the following advocacy positions to the Local Board Agreement:
Auckland Transport to advocate for a change of the give way rule requiring motorists to give way to pedestrians at intersections
Yay!
That would be a huge and very welcome change.
This position was developed by Pippa Coom, and has my strong support, based on my experiences living in Canada. We are responsible for this advocacy position to Auckland Transport. The idea is starting to gain traction within Auckland Transport, but will require a NZTA regulatory change, and AT are best placed to work with NZTA to achieve this.
Christopher Dempsey.
You have my support! Thanks for pushing this along.
same here, very important. transformational, as they say.
I feel almost famous, getting a blog mention as a regular reader but only occasional commenter 🙂
(Another one that I noticed the other day, that also falls into the same category as above, is the Broadway/Remuera Road crossing on the southern side, e.g. crossing east to west from the pedestrian island to 277. This intersection also has the Barnes dance/exclusive pedestrian cycle as mentioned in this blog, but right before that exclusive cycle begins, there’s no traffic movements on the southern end, so pedestrians could cross if they dare…or alternatively just wait a little longer…)
Another piece of cake improvement to the intersection in the first photo would be to widen the pedestrian crossing. At present it appears to be the same width as the footpath. OK a low pedestrian volumes, but as volumes increase there won’t be enough “green man” time for them all to cross. Either “green man” time will need to increase, or the painted crossing widened. The latter would mean that cars have to wait one car space back from their current positions, but a plus for motorists is that the extra pedestrian capacity would not be at the expense of green time for cars. (I’d personally favour both wider crossings and more green time.) In Melbourne there are some really wide pedestrian crossings near the major railway stations, and even that’s not enough a peak hour.
Hey Kent, the example I mentioned in the previous post (Wakefield and Symonds) doesn’t have an exclusive pedestrian phase on the intersection, so AT’s reasoning about safety wouldn’t stand. Did you ask about that one?
I didn’t. Not sure what you mean exactly. The uphill intersection at Airedale needs to be re-worked. I saw some poor souls there yesterday perched on that island expecting to be able to cross Symonds. They eventually had to double back and cross somewhere else. Is the crossing along Symonds messed up as well? Besides the terrible slip lane?
Yes, with the slip lane left into Wakefield, combined with a lit red arrow into Wakefield for traffic turning heading uphill on Symonds, pedestrians walking along Symonds should have a green man as long as traffic gets the green light. Instead it is the usual few second green man combined with a lengthy (2 minute?) don’t cross.
This blog series (the Piece of Cake series) made me think that we need a bug tracker. So i set one up: https://bugs.launchpad.net/aucklandbugs/. It could be an interesting way of keeping tabs on city issues.
What’s cool about a bug tracker is we can set “importance” and assign people to issues. If we got our elected representatives involved we could assign them “city bugs” and track their progress (or lack thereof).
That’s a interesting idea. Have you heard of StreetMix? You might like it. Bit of background- Code for America is a “Peace Corp for Nerds” that tackle urban problems using technology. Here it is. http://streetmix.net/
What’s fascinating to me is that they chose to tackle this project, kind of a hack. The streets are being democratized at every level!
I’m going to start playing with the bug tracker to see if it fits with the project. Thanks.
I will look into streetmix, cheers!
If you search around, one guy has a beta of a metric version.
Daniel, your suggestion is a no go for safety reasons. the flashing green implies a pedestrian can continue crossing even near the end when there is not enough time to safely cross. however I think Auckland and CHCH are discussing using a pedestrian lantern that flashes an amber man which would convey the same idea that pedestrians still have right of way to finish crosssing.
Christopher, timers to show wait times for pedestrians is a no go. they may work overseas where they use fixed time plans when you know exactly when the pedestrian phase is going to run. In Auckland we have an adaptive system that adjusts timings based on demand. pedestrian wait times can vary wildly between cycles and is not known until the last second. ie the preceding phase may end early or an unplanned phase may run. in essence the timing could jump up or down suddenly.
Countdown timers on parallel crossings is generally unsafe. People should not be crossing after the green man finishes. Essentially running an amber/red light. we can’t stop people from running red lights but we shouldn’t be encouraging it either. I also hear the countdown units are horrendously expensive.
“Countdown timers on parallel crossings is generally unsafe.” Can you explain this?
All the data I see is that they are safer, For example- http://www.docstoc.com/docs/104534620/Pedestrian-Countdown-Signals-Evaluation-of-Citywide-Installation
Also, from this report, they can be cost effective since the new technology is energy efficient.
there a small difference between running a red light with 2 tons of steel around you and running a countdown timer with your feet. We shouldn’t see pedestrians like machines.
Hey Ari, how do the adaptive systems work out how to adjust timings based on pedestrian demand, are there sensors in the footpath that anticipate where pedestrians are planning on heading?
Maybe the adaptive systems works on how many times the button is pushed. Always push it 5 items, just in case 🙂
Wait timers for pedestrians, from a pedestrian perspective should definitely be a go go. From my experience the ‘adaptive’ system only favours motor vehicles; in fact, it feels as if the whole of Auckland’s traffic light system is based on deterring pedestrians. Just see how unresponsive lights are when a pedestrian presses a beg button and how responsive they are when a motorised vehicle approaches that same set of lights. Mind you, if motorists had to do as pedestrians do and get out of their cars and press beg buttons before crossing intersections we’d certainly get a more level playing field and it might also have the benefit of getting people out of their cars permanently and onto trains where there are, of course, no such issues!
That’s an interesting read. though I have always questioned the value of examples from the US where vehicles must give way to pedestrians everywhere and where you can be sued huge sums for failing to give way to them.
As opposed to NZ where drivers can run over a pedestrian who started crossing well after the red man started flashing and place the blame on the pedestrian for failing to follow the road rules.
Pedestrians are more or less breaking the law when they start crossing after the red man starts flashing. countdown timers on parallel crossings encourage this illegal and unsafe pedestrian behavior. The rules may need changing, but that is easier said then done.
Still there could be some interesting things to glean from such research.
Countdown lanterns used to cost something like 10x normal lanterns, but I was just told it has gone down significantly in recent years to something like 2x. so I stand corrected in terms of cost issues.
Yes, but from the pedestrians perspective what is the difference from being hit when it’s not your fault? In both cases you get basic health care and then you’re on your own. The only difference is that the driver might go to jail. Whoop-de-doo.
I see the red man as a recommendation which I usually follow. But since I walk a lot I often have to cross roads with no markings or traffic signs. So tell me, if I already have to walk across New North Road traffic daily, with only paint between me and fast moving traffic, do you really think I’m gonna wait for several minutes to cross badly designed intersections?
The Kitchener/Bowen/Victoria ped lights are just occasionally useful street furniture. Ugly street art, if you like, that demonstrates the half-assed approach to non-car traffic in Auckland.