Walking in Waterloo Region

[Chris]

A nice side effect of the bike infrastructure at Weber and Wellington is that you no longer have to hit the beg button to walk across the intersection. I like not having to race to hit the beg button or cross against the signal because I got to the intersection a second or two late.

Lol...

Interestingly, the traffic light engineers are unwilling to even understand that problem. I literally had this conversation with them, and I explained it three ways, and they said "I don't understand". It might have been one of the conversations that got me not renewed on ATAC.

Everyone is so thrilled about staff turnover in the transportation department, I wonder if that person is gone as well.

The reason I felt it was worth trying to explain it three times is that Ottawa (you know, the just as car centric capital city), their traffic signals don't have this problem. If you are late to push the button, and the light is already green, but there is enough time in the phase (or potential time, i.e., the light would be extended for a car) for the ped phase to run, the ped phase will be triggered when you press the button. So clearly it is possible within an Ontario framework and infrastructure, just not possible within the head of the traffic signal engineer for the region.

I was wondering if this works at Duke and Victoria. I feel like one day last week I hit the beg button (or the person across the street did) and it switched from Don't walk to walk. I need to witness this again to confirm as I might have just missed that it was already on walk.

Also, every time I hit these beg buttons I really wish the traffic engineers had the experience of using them and the frustration of standing in the heat, cold or rain while waiting for the signals to cycle back around to your legal time to cross. I think if they experienced this themselves, they would change the system.