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Tag Archives: Crosswalks
Finally, A Mid-Block Crosswalk That Works
Crosswalk on Floyd Street
While walking along Floyd Street at the University of Louisville, I was astonished to find a fancy new crosswalk installed to connect the Swain Student Activities Center with the Cardinal Park athletic fields. Louisville has plenty of mid-block crosswalks where a stop-light or stop sign isn’t feasible or even desirable, but, as I have noted before, our older mid-block crosswalks can fail miserably.
At other mid-block crosswalks around town, the pedestrian may have the right-of-way, but it’s up to the motorists to know how such a crosswalk works and then actually stop. Results are usually mixed and the pedestrian must be on high-guard at all times. Now, the University of Louisville’s new crosswalk makes crossing the street a little bit easier and a lot safer.
The Floyd Street crosswalk is similar to an example from Seattle (check the video in the last post) that responds to a pedestrian crossing the street. Two bollards detect a pedestrian ready to cross and activate flashing lights embedded into the street and several others lining the perimeter of adjacent signs. After watching several students cross the street and motorists immediately stop each time, it’s clear that there’s something to the design.
You may have seen mid-block crosswalks with perpetually blinking lights warning drivers to pay caution. These new lights only flash when there is a pedestrian present. Could it be that motorists have become numb to the older lights and tend to ignore them? The small lights in the pavement on each side of the crosswalk also help as well and are visible clearly during the day.
So does this work now because of its novelty or could this design prove valuable years down the road? Whatever the answer, it would be great to see this model adopted in other parts of the city.
- Crossing In Pedestrian Style In Seattle, Louisville, and England (Broken Sidewalk)
PrintTicketing Drivers For Blasting Through A Crosswalk
StreetsBlog points us to a police sting in Sacramento, this time targeting bad driving behaviors such as not yielding to pedestrians. When I first watched this clip, it seemed a little too good to be true, that dangerous drivers endangering pedestrians would be held accountable, but a plain-clothes officer spent the day walking back and forth across the street to show just how regular such a violation is. Here’s some info on the sting from StreetsBlog:
“Back in April, TV station KCRA filmed a plainclothes Sacramento officer busting motorists who couldn’t be bothered to yield the right of way. Notice how, though they cite the potential amount of the fine, neither the anchor nor the reporter ever intimate that the operation is a money-making scheme? Instead of sticking a mic in a driver’s face for a quick-and-dirty accusation of extortion — a near-must in most any mainstream media story about traffic enforcement — the reporter is completely sympathetic to the pedestrians in harm’s way, and rightly credits the officer for putting his life on the line.”
Earlier this year, I told you about the mid-block pedestrian crossings found throughout Louisville, complete with obnoxious and only semi-effective neon signs. Stepping into such a crosswalk in Louisville can be very dangerous, but could enforcing the pedestrian’s right-of-way help to improve crosswalks of all sorts?
And if you missed it in the news roundup a little while back, be sure to check out another StreetsBlog find on how Chicago is educating its officers and the public about bike safety.
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