09-13-2016, 03:03 PM
(09-13-2016, 01:29 PM)MidTowner Wrote:(09-13-2016, 01:15 PM)ijmorlan Wrote: Why not more pedestrian refuges, anyway? Most roads don’t need anything more than a pedestrian refuge, especially if the road is only one lane in each direction. They didn’t answer that question, just talked about a minor variation on the existing concept of a crosswalk as if it were a substantial new idea.
I agree with this, especially when thinking about a crossing such as Union and the Spur Line. If one of these newfangled level two crossings is put there, what proportion of motorists will be aware of their obligation to stop?
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Actually, in the case of Union and the Spur Line, a level two crossing isn't even possible given the distance from Moore. But they're no good anywhere since they don't accommodate cyclists. I think your question- "why not more pedestrian refuges, anyway?"- is dead on. On many streets, they'll actually provide safety without depending on motorists to follow the rules, which is the ideal.
Not only that, but pedestrian refuges work with many motorists’s existing desire to stop for pedestrians. I remember crossing King at the tracks before it closed — four lanes of traffic. Many drivers would stop for me, but it wasn’t as helpful as they believed because I had to worry about both the other direction and the other lane in the same direction. Sometimes I actually found it annoying — I would have rather they just drove on and been out of the way. With a pedestrian refuge, this is reduced down to just worrying about one direction, which in turn means one peleton of cars coming from a green light (instead of two, one from each direction). When the road is only one lane in each direction, this is further reduced to being confident that if a car has stopped for me, I can safely cross in front of it. So it takes advantage of an existing instinct towards helpfulness, rather than emphasizing command-and-control which like it or not is what traffic signals are.
In short, pedestrian refuges are way underused. Even very busy roads can be quite safe to cross with a refuge since the traffic often comes in waves controlled by signals.