More details on Dominion Rd released

Chris, being a pedestrian pushing a button that is about 0.5m from where you are required to wait is about as hard as driving your car over the sensors in the road.

In regards to waiting in the rain, hundreds of thousands of car drivers need to wait in the rain at the signals on a rainy day.

In regards to giving priority to cars, this never happens, at every normal crossing pedestrains get just as much priority as cars. At other locations pedestrains get more priority with either double phasing or turning cars being required to give way

As for ignoring, if you push the button this never happens, chances are you just missed your phase and so have to wait for the next one. Just like your in a car.

I have

Actually many of the signalled pedestrian crossings do give priorities to cars. You press the button and have to wait a few minutes before the signal changes. If the signal was not prioritising cars it would change immediately. The worst part of it is that at off-peak times there are usually gaps between vehicles that are long enough to cross safely without waiting for the signal, which obviously means that the signal could change quicker without affecting vehicular movement to any great degree.

Also, at many traffic lights the signal will change to allow vehicle movement through even without activating a sensor. This is not the case for pedestrian movement through the intersection, however, as the crossing will not activate unless you press the button. In many cases there is no reason the crossing could not activate at every phase at the same time as the green signal for vehicular traffic, with turning vehicles giving way to pedestrians as required.

No, my point about being able to cross without needing the signal means that the equal volume argument does not apply. That is, the volume of traffic is low enough that there are long periods of no vehicles using the road. Yet, the crossing still forces pedestrians to wait, clearly giving priority to the *possibility* of a vehicle using the road, rather than an *actual* pedestrian needing to cross.

Further, you have completely ignored my point about the crossings at traffic lights which again demonstrate the priority given to vehicles over pedestrians.

Regardless of timing issues I still fail to see why the crossings at lights could not activate automatically at green signals. The NZ road code requires turning vehicles to give way to pedestrians. If there are no pedestrians, the vehicles are not affected. Yet, the usual case I have seen is for the crossing to not activate unless a pedestrian has pressed the button early enough to ‘catch’ the phase. If you forget or are slightly too late (or are a tourist who doesn’t understand the need to press the button), the crossing will not activate and instead give a green arrow to vehicles. If the crossing always activated, pedestrians would still have to wait for their turn like everyone else, but would at least make sure they do get a turn, and not have to press a button to ‘beg’ to be given a chance to cross.

I take your point about intelligent vs dumb crossings, and not all signalled crossings are as bad as I have indicated. But this highlights a big problem with these dumb crossings in that they end up being completely useless and even counter-productive. Pedestrians press the button. Have to wait. A gap in the track opens up. Pedestrians cross. Signal later changes stopping vehicles but there are no longer pedestrians needing to cross. A simple solution without the need for sensors would be to have the crossing use a time-of-day based delay (i.e. activate immediately/quickly at off-peak times, but slowly at peak times), or simply ensure that the pedestrian crossing is activated after a certain delay from when it was last activated, rather than a delay from when it was pressed (I believe that the latter approach is used for some current crossings on Dominion Rd).

I also disagree about cars ‘definitely getting a fine’. I have seen plenty of cars go through an obvious red light and pass the intersection on the green phase of the pedestrian light, yet I have never seen any vehicles being ticketed for this. I would not be averse to pedestrians being fined for crossing dangerously when they could safely use a crossing, but the rules aren’t exactly being applied to drivers anyway.

wtl does have a point on many ped crossings. The signalised ped crossings that are not at an intersection (and not near an intersection so not tied to phasing of one) will ALWAYS make the ped wait, even if the button hasnt been pushed for several minutes. This is different to a signalised intersection with cars. The situation of an mid block signalised ped crossing is analogous to a “dwell in main” intersection for cars. At a dwell in main intersection, the lights stay green for the main road until the minor road signal is tripped by a car. In this situation the minor road will immediately get a green light UNLESS the minor road was previously given a green in the last X seconds (eg 120 seconds).

So it is different for cars and peds in this situation.

Another situation is where a ped crossing doesnt dwell in green even if it is across the nose of a one way street on red. As has been pointed out on this blog before. Cars dont tend to get red lights when they would not otherwise be conflicting with other movements.

Swan, a couple of issues there. Firstly mid block signals are normally coordinated with intersections nearby and hence why you think you are waiting for nothing, so no different to how cars are treated.

Next up the ones that are not coordinated often have a sensor to see if a pedestrain is actually there, rather than pushing the button and then moving on which happens extremely often. So these ones my expect you to wait an entire 5s before changing.

In regards to your oneway street, that is due to a lazy signal programmer and is so rare its not worth mentioning. Another issue is that ped crossings have very long clearance times, and so when you have an intersection that gives extra time for each car that goes through the ped crossing will still have to stick with a defined length.

You are simply using safety as an excuse for inconveniencing a section of road users – pedestrians. Sure you design systems to ensure safety even when people make mistakes, I’m not saying not to. But I really don’t see how making automatic pedestrians crossings at green lights is such a huge safety issue. One could argue that traffic lights encourage drivers to become complacent and not look carefully for other vehicles, but somehow I doubt I will hear you arguing for the removal of all traffic lights because they encourage complacency and therefore increase accidents (although I know this idea has been used in some cities). Anyway, below you said that you support pedestrians having the right of way at left turns, which is pretty much what I’m suggesting here for controlled intersections (i.e. the pedestrian crossing on the left hand side automatically activates when straight through traffic has the green light, so only turning traffic has to look for and give way to pedestrians), so I don’t know why you are arguing with me.

The whole red light thing is a distraction. It was simply to highlight that fact that your point about drivers who run red lights ‘definitely’ getting a ticket is complete bullshit. Sure, if there was a enforcement officer at the intersection this would happen, but my point was that it was very poorly enforced even for drivers, so therefore you can hardly complain that pedestrians aren’t ticketed.

As for the final bit, I never said that pedestrians don’t take risks. That was my point about ticketing pedestrians who cross dangerously – by all means, go ahead and get the police to crack down on that, you won’t catch me complaining. Of course one of the reasons (although far from the only reason) that pedestrians take such risks is that many roads are poorly designed to accommodate them. I’m confused because half your words in that paragraph were gibberish about something I supposedly said (” you say it dangerous to cross the road when you have just been campaigning for people to be able to cross at the same time as cars”) when I said no such thing.

SF Lauren read my post. I wasn’t talking about signal linked to intersections. And on ones not linked to intersections it is not a 5 sec wait certainly where I frequent.

Swan, I meaning a 5 sec wait before the signal goes into action.

From my many long years of crossing roads and taking close attention due to being a geek in such matters I don’t think I have ever waited more than 30s.

I know it can feel a long time when the other side of the road is 8m away but 10 to 30s is really about all you have to wait.

Try thinking about the 10 other people who had to wait to watch you cross the road and then wait some more because the signals didn’t know if you were mobility impaired or not.

All up those 10 people waited just as long as you yet you claim you were the one hard done by as you had to push a button.

Can I ask which mid-block signals you are referring to.

This is interesting swan, it would appear there must be some sort of defect in thessignals if they make you wait for so long.

I may have to test this for myself when I get the chance. If I happen to wait less than 60s however you will go down a few notches in trust.

I’m telling you why it’s called a beg button, in general. I do think it’s probably the best type of crossing for situations like places along Dominion Road where there’s a lot of vehicle traffic, but few pedestrians crossing.

For roads that have little pedestrian traffic and little vehicle traffic, a zebra crossing is probably a better idea. For roads with lots of pedestrians and lots of cars, a “dumb” set of traffic lights that lights the pedestrian phase without a button works well and is a nice touch for pedestrians. It doesn’t hold up cars, because generally there are so many people crossing that the ped phase would have been activated every time anyway.

But beg buttons do have their problems: have a look at
http://gettingaroundmpls.wordpress.com/2012/02/13/a-typology-of-beg-buttons/
http://walkingbostonian.blogspot.co.nz/2011/09/in-defense-of-dumb-traffic-lights.html
http://transitized.com/2012/12/30/how-push-to-walk-reduces-the-quality-of-walkable-neighborhoods/

It’s not universal for pedestrian crossings to have beg buttons: in the US, many intersections in San Francisco, and various east coast cities, don’t have them. Their road rules are a bit different – since pedestrians always (theoretically) have right of way over turning traffic, and there’s usually no arrows to stop right turns, every right turn is a filter turn. So no matter which type of crossing it is, drivers only wait for the pedestrian phase if someone’s actually crossing. They also have right-turn-on-red, which means that cars that have to wait for pedestrians during the green, still have the chance to turn during the red, which more than makes up for it.

See for example http://apps.dmv.ca.gov/pubs/hdbk/right_of_way.htm but every state is pretty similar.

The biggest benefit of not having a button (at quieter intersections) is that pedestrians don’t have to arrive at the intersection “in time” to activate the phase – they can cross if they arrive at any time during it. It’s also a sign of a transport agency that does value pedestrians, rather than having a value system that promotes car traffic above everything else.

SF Lauren,

Here is one reason to think about. The topology of the road and footpath network (in NZ and everywhere I have ever been) is such that the road network is continuous but the foot path network is discontinuous. So in any given trip peds have to give way far more often than cars. One way to partially alleviate this unfairness would be to give peds automatic right of way when they are cross across T intersections with a main road.

I’m not saying (unlike that first link) that beg buttons should never, ever be used. But beg buttons aren’t good for pedestrians, so I think people are entitled to have a negative opinion and a pejorative name for them.

I do think we have the balance between cars and people wrong. Generally, in early 21st century New Zealand, our streets are designed so that most of the space is given over permanently to vehicles, and at intersections, vehicles get most of the time. The “default” is always that cars go first, and pedestrians wait for a signal, or wait for a break in the traffic. If we are designing cities to be pleasant places to actually be in, we want to make it easier to walk, and give pedestrians more priority over cars. It’s pretty simple, really. It means giving pedestrians zebra-crossing style priority at most intersections with minor roads, and frequent pedestrian phases at intersections on main roads.

As a thought experiment, what would happen if we flipped our default idea of who should get priority by default? What if pedestrians were considered as important as motorists are now, instead? Think of a mid-block, signalised crossing. First of all, the crossing would be level with the footpath, with a steep ramp up from the roadway (if that). Cars would have to slow to 10 km/h or less to drive over it.

When there’s no-one around, the pedestrian light is green, and the cars get a red. The cars only get a green light if the car sensor is tripped, and if cars stop moving through, the light goes back to red. Plus, if the cars have had a green phase recently, then they don’t get another one for at least another 30 seconds, and in times of statistical heavy foot traffic, maybe not for several minutes.

Steve D. In your flip concept you would create huge amounts of congestion forcing pretty much every vehicle to stop multiple times at every intersection on the pure off chance that one single pedestrain makes there way across the intersection at some point.

Pretty much you would have destroyed the road transport network.

Are you for real Steve. Are you honestly saying that when you go for a walk that the footpath is completely blocked with stationary pedestrains and that you have to wait for about 100 signal phases taking about 4 hours just to get through a single intersection because your are only permitted to cross the road one at a time.

I’m sorry but you must be making that up as I walking round parts of the city everyday and have never come across a situation even remotely like that.

Well I think I agree completely with that post. My only issue in the past posts is that people have been complaining about have been places were pets have been treated as equal and they are upset that they have to wait there turn e everone else.

In regards to your last point, not only are peds smaller most of them are inside vehicles for most of the trip.

A good example of peds being treated second rate it Stu’s post, “not so happy feet”

SF Lauren, its not just T intersections, its the topology of the entire network. There is another asymmetry that Steve points to – peds don’t need temporal separation of conflicting movements. It is only when you add cars to the mix.

Swan, are correct that pedestrains traveling at 4km/h for journeys of some 1km in length don’t need much spacing and hence why you don’t habe traffic signals in shopping centres or your hallway at home

However as we all know most intersections on roads don’t have throngs of people with the occasional vehicle but the other way round.

When the rare opposite happens we can have a shared space such as have they been doing in the CBD.

It’s not so much that they block the view, but that they are dangerous. Proven so.
In other recent comments you’re a champion of pedestrian safety and making traffic throughput a prime consideration. Neither of those aims are served by using road space for parking.