You may have noticed changes to crosswalks while out on your daily meander.
We’re working on upgrading our signaled pedestrian crossings to make sure the people who use them are safe, and motorists can see them better.
“We’ve noticed people will stop in the middle of a crossing, and we don’t want to encourage it,” said Lori Garet, Traffic Signals Design and Construction Engineer with the City.
“Sometimes medians are too narrow to stop on safely. We don’t want to encourage people to stop where it’s not safe – we want them to just keep going to the other side. So we’re getting rid of the middle man, so to speak.”
At locations with narrow medians, we are removing the median button and adding low flashing lights to catch motorists’ attention to protect pedestrians. We make sure to adjust flashing time so people have plenty of time to cross the whole street.
At wider medians, we are replacing dual-button poles (one pole with a button for each direction of travel) with two poles that clearly show which is for which direction.
That’s because we’ve noticed people sometimes press the wrong button.
“Over time we discover that there are better or more effective ways of doing things and that’s why we need to make changes,” said Garet.
“Our primary goal is to keep people safe. This change reduces the room for user error and makes the crossings more likely to be visible to drivers at the right time, in the right direction.”