Unintended Consequences For Traffic Safety Feature

An anonymous reader writes: Traffic engineers had a problem to solve: too many pedestrians were getting hit by cars while using the crosswalks at intersections because they didn't know when the 'WALK' sign would change. Their solution was simple: implement a countdown timer. Countless cities have now adopted these timers, but it turns out to have an undesired consequence: motor vehicle crashes are actually increasing at intersections where the countdown timer is used. Researchers think this is because pedestrians aren't the only ones who see the timers. Drivers see them too, and it provides them with information on when the light will change. Then they anticipate the change by either speeding up to beat a change to red light, or anticipating a green light in order to get through before the pedestrians can move into the road. The researchers suggest finding some way to hide the countdown from the drivers, perhaps through the use of an audio countdown that would be difficult to hear from inside a car.

Comments

Not for deaf/hard of hearing...

[Anonymous Coward]

Please don't do an audio countdown. It doesn't work for us hard of hearing people.

Re:Not for deaf/hard of hearing...

[nospam007]

"Please don't do an audio countdown. It doesn't work for us hard of hearing people."

Where I live, they have audio ticking for blind people. They make a ticking noise when it's green for pedestrians.
Although some of them seem to be made for almost-deaf blind people, since it's very loud even during daytime.

sound and sides

[thaylin]

Make angled sides on the signal to that you can only see it from like a +/- 5 degree angle, or less, and use sounds for the blind.

OR

[Murdoch5]

Drivers need to pay attention to the road, there is no excuse for hitting a pedestrian in a cross walk or for a car to hit car at a cross walk. Drivers need to grow up, pay attention and stop blaming everything but the lack of driving ability.

Re:OR

[BitZtream]

While you are 100% correct, I was always taught to pay attention to my surroundings ... and that includes keeping an eye out for a ton or two object moving at a decent speed.

One could argue that in most cases, a pedestrian paying attention could have avoided getting ran over if they'd pulled their heads out of their phones long enough to look around them.

Audible warning

[dywolf]

In atlanta at least, the countdown is already accompanied by an audible chirp.
Intended for blind or otherwise disabled folks (except deaf folks, naturally), it also serves as a cue for regular folks as well to hurry up on some of hte larger/wider intersections.

Really all that should be fixed is to put a bigger gap between the countdown reaching 0 and the light actually changing. My experience with signal timing (and this is my trafic engineering schooling showing through) is roughly half-half: about half the intersections I saw with the countdown change immediately, others still have the standard 4-5 second "intersection clearance delay" between the countdown ending, and the light actually changing. The clearance delay exists for obvious reasons to put a delay between one side turning red and another green. It should simply also take the crosswalk into consideration as well as a best practice.