huh, me neither. This is a smart analysis. I also hate the fact that some of these buttons are "dummies" that don't do anything, and some are broken at any given time.

Agreed. It's nice that the signals up here are automatic AND they have alternating sounds for the blind to make it safe(r) for them to cross.

That said, Vancouver has a fairly high rate of vehicle versus person accidents.

See, I read that and thought, "Princess, I'm glad you've found your pea." I walk every day in a congested city and have never felt as pitiful about it as this person.

Intersection signal timing can be quite complex and variable through the course of the day and week. Generally, pedestrian actuation is for those intersections where the overall through signal must be lengthened to accommodate pedestrians and/or provide a sonic indicator for the blind.

I've long thought those buttons near the crosswalk were connected to some big map "downtown", where a little light would illuminate to alert the waiting paramedics that some hopelessly optimistic pedestrian was about to attempt something foolhardy.

I certainly believe that they have their place, but as far as I can tell *all* the intersections in my fairly pedestrian-heavy college town have them, and I find it infuriating not to just be able to cross with the green. At least on the main shopping streets, slowing down traffic to prioritize pedestrians should be a default, not some special favor the pedestrians have to ask for.

Also, we also have weird crosswalk things in the middle of a few blocks that have flashing lights that are activated if a pedestrian crosses, which requires all traffic to come to a screeching halt at a non-intersection -- and pedestrians end up using these crossings a lot because the intersection crossings take too long because of the actuated signals. It makes *no* sense to me.

Triode, ha! I love that image.

I hate the traffic lights that have under the road sensors so that they only change to green if a car has stopped over them. If you are on a bike you have to sit and wait for a car to come along or wait for a very long time before you can cross.

One intersection in Fresno was so dangerous to cross that jaywalking in the center of the block was safer. First, the walk signal was too short for my snail's pace, and second, in two directions, cars making right turns on red barely slowed and their sightlines into the crosswalk were blocked by guys holding Little Caesars placards.

arse_hat, I hate that too! Back in Chapel Thrill, there was one particularly bad spot to wait on your bike, and traffic is heavy on the main road, so you can't really just sprint across four lanes of traffic. You could sit five minutes, sometimes more just waiting for a car to come along and trip the sensor.
The town I live in now is surprisingly pedestrian friendly. In addition to crosswalks at lights, there are pedestrian crossings up and down the main roads, and miracle of miracles! People actually stop to let people cross! In most places throughout Brazil, you cross an intersection in peril, but not here. Strange, this place is.

msali, oddly enough when we moved here we were shocked by the pedestrian crossings at malls and stores. They are just painted lines on the roadway but people just walk out and everyone stops. Odd behaviour here in motown.

One of the advantages of almost never having 'scramble' crossings here is that pedestrians get the same length and frequency of green lights that cars do - ever time the light for cars is green one way, it's green for pedestrians the same way. The downside is that, if youw ant to cross diagonally, you hve to cross both streets over two changes of lights. In peak times, most of the pedestrian buttons are disabled and the lights are simply timed, although people still push the buttons. In fact, there are intersections here that have buttons that are not even connected - there were put there because of complaints from pedestrians that there is no button to get across the street. Installing the buttons stopped the complaints, even though nothing else had changed. Sometimes, people just like to to feel in control, I guess.

I spent a few days in Hanoi last year and crosing the street was just about the most never-racking thing I've ever done. While there are lights and pedestrian crossings in a few place, they seem to be merely decorative and are completely ignored. We discovered (by sticking to the locals at first) that the tecnique is simply to step off the footpath and keep walking at a steady pace and the traffic will go around you. The worst thing you can do is stop, because drivers anticipate where you are going to be. If you tried to do that here, you would be dead the first time you tried to cross the street.

If you are on a bike you have to sit and wait for a car to come along or wait for a very long time before you can cross.

I wrote a little Haiku that sums up my approach to such intersections:

I stop for people
whose right of way I honor.
But not for no one.

Fortunately, the local police seem to treat me like I'm riding in my own private Idaho.

I've always thought the buttons are there only to make you feel less annoyed about waiting for a green light because you've done something about it, while in reality, they do nothing because if they did, they'd completely mess up the whole cycle in the radius of several blocks.

omg so much angst I have for this topic.

Fortunately they've been doing their due diligence here in Boulder, and recently decided to go back and rip out all those stupid flashing-strobe crosswalks they installed 5 years ago in the middle of some heavily congested areas near campus. Because they actually ran the stats at the city and discovered that it was merely making things MORE hazardous, not less.

And they've done a number of things at intersections to make ped / driver interactions more friendly, as well as I noted a recent crackdown on handheld cellphone use, which has been illegal-but-unenforced for awhile. We don't have a huge number of ped-request crosswalks; the majority of them here include pedestrians by default, but then a lot of people walk to places in this town too. It's a small dense community with a big campus, a lot of good ped infrastructure, and traffic and parking is universally shitty and congested everywhere (owing to limited-growth mandates), so there you go.

the bad news is that the flashing strobe thing was implemented all over the place as "the next best thing" a few years back, and thus became an expensive taxpayer boondoggle, but hey, I find local governments are good at that.

FORTUNATELY for us, the cities of Boulder and Denver are quite bike-friendly / alt-transport positive, and the transportation engineers set the sensitivity of relay loops at the lights high enough that you can, in fact, trip them with a bike. And if you find one that doesn't work, you can report it to the local TSB and they'll fix it. I think the guy in the article even said it's a five second software fix at the main office, so there's no real reason not to fix them. The default setting is apparently so low that even some small motorcycles won't trigger it. You CAN often trigger a recalcitrant loop by laying the bike on its side to expose the most magnetic bits of drivetrain (chain, bottom bracket shell) directly to the loop cut (i.e. one of the little slits in the pavement), but it's kind of a hassle and if it's already snowpacked/icy, then all bets are off.

The bigger issue I think is one of driver education. We do so badly with that here in the States, can't really speak to other nations, tho Switzerland was a breath of fresh air in that regard.

I was thinking about this on the way home last night - drivers have this enormous sense of entitlement because they can just GET AWAY with so much shit, owing to several things - they are the vast majority of volume, they are pretty much anonymous inside their little tinted climate-controlled boxes, and they have much lower risk in a minor fender-bender scenario owing to the protection of said box. Not to mention, to the vast majority of drivers, bikes and peds are essentially utterly invisible UNTIL one of us does something stupid which raises their ire/attention. So there's also a great degree of confirmation bias at play here. I bet any one of the drivers who rants about ped/bike "lawlessness" couldn't actually tell you how many (primarily law-abiding) members of us alt-transport folks are actually out there because THEY NEVER ACTUALLY NOTICE US to begin with.

I would be very interested to see hard data to back this up, because a similar situation was recently raised here re: trail user conflicts on our local open space. The hikers complained so bitterly about mountain bikes "doing illegal/rude stuff" that they got the local college students to sit out on the open space trails with clipboards all summer. And guess what? The bikes were, within a vast majority, well within compliance to trail rules; there was a 1-2% deviation - some of the comments noted that bikes would often go far out of their way to comply with rules and/or help other trail users. And this ties with my own experience - we riders are so constantly browbeaten about the rules of the trail, and so frequently threatened with loss of access, that we're constantly on our utmost high awareness level about it. The hikers / dog walkers on the other hand? On average, they were "breaking the rules" at least 25% of the time. In certain places, they were as much as 60-70% out-of-compliance for things like failing to yield to equestrians, blocking the trail for other users / refusing to let other runners/hikers pass, littering, disturbing wildlife, going off-trail / into closed wilderness areas, letting dogs off-leash in leash-required areas, letting their dogs chase wildlife, etc., etc, ad nauseam. The bike thing was chalked up to confirmation bias; no one really notices bikes unless they're doing something wrong. It's so commonplace for hikers and dog walkers to be doing something off-color, though, and they're such a majority on the trails, that it kind of becomes background noise.

I'm willing to bet that the same situation is in play with drivers. It's partly majority privilege / entitlement issues and partly confirmation bias. I see maybe ten or fifteen bikes on a normal 5K commute, and maybe one of them (so 10%, generously) maybe doing something stupid, like riding salmon or not using lights after dark. From the TSB studies, I can estimate that I see roughly 250-300 cars on the same commute, and of them, I'd hazard that at least a quarter to a third are talking on handheld cell phones (which is illegal in this state), failing to merge/yield properly at intersections, failing to come to a complete stop to turn right, or conversely yield right on red, failing to yield properly to pedestrians, speeding, tailgating... on and on and on. So you get my drift.

wow that was a long axe-grindy semi-off-topic rant. Sorry! But yeah, until someone really runs the numbers and addresses this kind of sociological mob blindness with some kind of legitimate driver training, in an ongoing manner, there's really nothing that can be done to effect real change.

signed,

your local alt-transport curmudgeon

What I was taught both behind the wheel and the desk in Driver's Ed is :

that peds ALWAYS have the right of way.....even when they shouldn't (one of the things I especially despise about NYC are the pigshit drivers and bikers who fail to acknowledge this).

ALL corners are crosswalks

The most dangerous place to cross is a marked crosswalk

Yeah, I'm an LA native.