In response to a complaint about how the lights at Atlantic Avenue and Summer Street downtown now require pedestrians to cross with traffic rather than all alone, the city Transportation Department's engineering team optimistically says drivers will yield to walkers:
Walk signals at this location allow pedestrians to cross while the light is green for vehicles. Turning vehicles must yield to pedestrians. This type of signal phasing is widely used throughout the country. BTD is in the process of converting signals to this type of phasing where feasible as it allows for more time when pedestrians are allowed to cross.
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Comments
That's like betting that we
By Scratchie
Thu, 08/21/2014 - 10:40am
That's like betting that we get rain between now and Christmas. Taxis are gonna run the lights and clip people even if there are four red lights and a "No Turn on Red" sign.
Whut?!
By Taxista
Thu, 08/21/2014 - 1:16pm
As a Boston cabbie, I truly hate these signals. They're bad for traffic, and make oblivious pedestrians at risk for oblivious drivers. I always yield to pedestrians when they have a white walk signal, or at a non signalled cross walk for a few reasons: 1) it's the law and I don't want a ticket regardless of how I feel about the intersection, 2) it's better for safety so you don't hit or clip a pedestrian, and 3) I'm sympathetic to pedestrians who have to wait a while to cross.
In all honesty though, the pedestrian/driver/cyclists relationship is fucked up.
In all honesty though, the
By Scratchie
Thu, 08/21/2014 - 1:39pm
The deuce you say.
You say these things......
By ChrisInEastie
Thu, 08/21/2014 - 2:45pm
........and you're a cabbie in Boston?
I applaud you good sir or madam.
You should know
By Taxista
Thu, 08/21/2014 - 3:24pm
You should know that we're not all thieving bastards. I never talk on the phone when I have a fare, never smoke in my cab, never refuse fares no matter where they're going (including Eastie because tacos), don't drive too wrecklessly, and my credit card machine was only broken once, and that night I told every potential customer that it was broken.
We've gotten a bad reputation because of a few bad seeds, and because people blame us for the actions of out of town and gypsy cabs.
I'd say more than a few.
By ChrisInEastie
Thu, 08/21/2014 - 7:34pm
Either that, or I'm a magnet for the shitty ones. Regardless, glad to know there are "good" cabbies out there. Never doubted it, but you're kind of like bigfoot-oft talked about, allegedly spotted from time to time, but you never see it yourself and would be in awe if you did.
Do you work the day shift by chance? I feel like I remember that Globe expose last year talking about how the difference in drivers, habits, and attitudes was just as big as the difference in clientele between day and night, and how each affects the other.
Yes.
By Taxista
Fri, 08/22/2014 - 3:36am
Yes, I cut my teeth on the day shift, now I work doubles three days a week.
It's quite true; the culture of day drivers and night drivers are very different. Day drivers are used to credit cards and city traffic, while night drivers have a mantra of "drive fast and make cash."
Well
By ChrisInEastie
Fri, 08/22/2014 - 10:33am
The next time I play "I just want to get home" roulette, hopefully I catch you on a double.
Though I don't think I've needed a cab home since the T started late night service, it's nice to know I may have a 1/1000 chance of not having the driver roll up the window and drive away without saying a word when I tell him where I'm going.
I know you're always supposed
By gotdatwmd
Thu, 08/21/2014 - 10:37am
I know you're always supposed to yield to peds but if I'm understanding this right, there's no way to know if someone is jaywalking on a DNW side or not now and would make it so you have no idea if you're about to slam into someone running across the crosswalk while you have a green.
so you have no idea if you're
By Scratchie
Thu, 08/21/2014 - 10:41am
Only if you close your eyes.
Some peds just dart out
By gotdatwmd
Thu, 08/21/2014 - 10:43am
Some peds just dart out without looking, seen it happen several times before.
OK.
By JCK
Thu, 08/21/2014 - 10:51am
But this has absolutely nothing to do with light timing.
Some peds just dart out
By Scratchie
Thu, 08/21/2014 - 10:55am
If they're in a crosswalk, and they have a "Walk" light, they shouldn't have to look. It's your responsibility to look out for them.
Sure it is, but it seems
By gotdatwmd
Thu, 08/21/2014 - 11:01am
Sure it is, but it seems crazy dangerous for a pedestrian if drivers also have a green. How do you know they're looking? This sounds like it just functions like a x-walk without a light at all.
Did you miss the part about
By Scratchie
Thu, 08/21/2014 - 11:05am
Did you miss the part about how this is how it operates almost everywhere in the country, and across the world? It works when drivers don't assume they have a God-given right to go wherever the fuck they want, whenever the fuck they feel like it.
Might not have to, but they
By tk
Thu, 08/21/2014 - 12:00pm
Might not have to, but they're idiots if they don't.
That's true, obviously, but
By Scratchie
Thu, 08/21/2014 - 12:04pm
That's true, obviously, but completely irrelevant to gotdat's complaint that you can't synchronize walk lights with green lights because it's too hard for drivers to figure out whether there are peds in the crosswalk or not.
Worst traffic engineering...
By Michael Kerpan
Thu, 08/21/2014 - 12:22pm
... here in Boston of any of the places I've lived (Tulsa, Altanta area, Chicago).
Are you crazy? It's everyone
By anon
Thu, 08/21/2014 - 12:32pm
Are you crazy? It's everyone's responsibility to look! As a pedestrian I ALWAYS look before crossing a street. Get a grip, we live in a busy and congested city!
In civilized cities,
By Scratchie
Thu, 08/21/2014 - 12:48pm
In civilized cities, pedestrians with walk signals can safely step into crosswalks without checking over their shoulders. Obviously that doesn't apply in Boston, but it doesn't mean that cars have the right of way, either.
Scratchie, please tell me in
By anon
Thu, 08/21/2014 - 3:08pm
Scratchie, please tell me in which cities you routinely do not look both ways before crossing the street? I'm only familiar with Boston, Cambridge, Los Angeles, Manhattan and Chicago, and I can assure you that it is essential to look before crossing regardless of what a crossing signal tells you in these cities. Enlighten me, please!
Do you need to look up and down too?
By BlackKat
Fri, 08/22/2014 - 4:08am
It's pretty hard to see out the back of your head and at the same time use telepathy to know if that car coming up behind you is going to right turn through the crosswalk without slowing down for potential pedestrians.
Lunch hour count...
By MassMouse
Thu, 08/21/2014 - 10:38am
Tempted to just count "near-misses" during my lunch hour. This should be fun....
You have a better view than me, don't you.
By trickycrayon
Thu, 08/21/2014 - 10:57am
HI :D
Hey darlin'!
By MassMouse
Thu, 08/21/2014 - 4:47pm
:)
I wish BTD would...
By Love them Shadows
Thu, 08/21/2014 - 10:38am
I wish BTD would do a complete audit and adjustment of each and every walk signal in the city. I would guess that 95% of them suffer from one of the following:
- A walk signal when it's actually UNsafe to cross, because of turning cars that can't see the crosswalk etc (this is by far the worst, and there are quite a number of these)
- A Don't Walk signal when it IS perfectly, absolutely, 100% safe to cross, with no potential conflicts (in my mind this is the second-worst, because it completely has eroded my - and many others' - trust in the walk signals... and there are so many of these I can't even tally it)
- Walk signals that offer completely inadequate crossing time
- Walk signals over complex intersections that are so mistimed that pedestrians must wait through multiple signal cycles to cross completely - for example, crossing on Dartmouth from the Westin Copley to the BPL, and going only on walk signals! Similarly around Dewey Square, Charlesgate, Cleveland Circle, and many other places
- Walk signals that respond only to push-button - these should all be eliminated except for a few rare occassions where necessary, and which should be very clearly and prominently marked as such
- Combined with the above:
- Many new curb extensions/bump-outs
- New turn-on-red restrictions
- Dedicated bike signals where they can enhance safety for all street users
And finally, a bit of a utopian idea here, but... wouldn't it be nice if the Walk sign - as opposed to the Do Not Walk sign- was actually the default? So that, especially in dense walkable areas, pedestrians approaching a crossing would have more than a 50% chance of already having a Walk sign?
Dewey
By El Danimal
Thu, 08/21/2014 - 10:50am
Crossing around Dewey Square is a nightmare. Not sure how someone doesn’t get hit there every day.
You forgot a couple:
By chaosjake
Thu, 08/21/2014 - 12:12pm
-Walk signals that respond only to request button, but the request button is broken (as the corner of Cummins and Washington in Rozzie was for weeks)
-Walk signals that respond only to request button, but the whole damn pole where the request button is supposed to be was knocked down by a snowplow in January and the city/DCR hasn't bothered to replace it in the last eight fucking months, and now there is no way to request a walk signal to cross four lanes of traffic in each direction with staggered greens and turn arrows, so there is no safe time to cross against the light. And for good measure, the city marked a Citizen's Connect complaint about it resolved months ago. (specifically, the northeast corner of the intersection of Washington and West Roxbury Parkway)
I wish BTD would do a
By Scratchie
Thu, 08/21/2014 - 12:14pm
I'm sure they'll get right on that.
Is BTD listening?
By djc1414
Thu, 08/21/2014 - 11:40am
I really hope someone from the city is reading these comments. We're so far behind other cities when it comes to pedestrian traffic management. I think most locals know to actually watch the signals for the cars if you want to know if it's safe to cross otherwise you'll grow old waiting for the signal to be in your favor. Then all you need to be concerned with are the 3-4 drivers who simply don't stop for a fresh red signal.
Oh yes, I'm sure they'll give
By Scratchie
Thu, 08/21/2014 - 11:48am
Oh yes, I'm sure they'll give it their top priority.
Great info above about LPI
By walkboston
Thu, 08/21/2014 - 12:39pm
Great info above about LPI and the use of it in Cambridge. The consistency is what I think is key - all users (autos, transit, trucks, cyclists, walkers, runners) know what to expect when they approach an intersection.
I'm sure they are taking notes, but happy to try and help push for changes if they aren't. Drop a note to [email protected] with concerns about specific intersections.
-Brendan
Wouldn't it be easier to send
By Scratchie
Thu, 08/21/2014 - 12:48pm
Wouldn't it be easier to send notes about the intersections that we *don't* have concerns about?
Burying the lede
By Matthew
Thu, 08/21/2014 - 2:07pm
BTD is looking outside of Boston for examples of how to do things! That's major progress!
Don't worry
By Scratchie
Thu, 08/21/2014 - 2:46pm
I'm sure they'll implement it in a half-assed manner and never enforce it anyway.
During my last visit to
By anon
Thu, 08/21/2014 - 3:12pm
During my last visit to Canada not only do the have signals for cars and pedestrians, but they had signals for cyclists. What was more shocking was that Canadians actually obeyed the traffic signals AND didn't blow through their stop signal while pedestrians were crossing the street. It was MIND-BLOWING! Would love to see that instituted in Boston and Cambridge.
Someone make sure the cops know that...
By raz611
Thu, 08/21/2014 - 6:41pm
The traffic lights/crosswalk have been set up that way on the corner of Huntington and Belvidere for a while (near the entrance to the pru). I cross that street multiple times every day, so am very familiar with the setup. It is a bit annoying, but the only time I run into issues is when the cops refuse to yield. Recently, I was crossing the street, and a cop refused to yield for me. I had to jump out of the way to avoid getting hit and threw my arms up at him. He then pulls over, gets out of the car and comes running up to me yelling. He claims I was illegally crossing the road and he should arrest me - I point out the crosswalk sign which is still on and the "yield to pedestrian" sign that he ignored. He calls me a liar (he claimed that the crosswalk is never on at the same time as the green to turn right.. which is obviously not true) and continues to yell and harass me until multiple other people nearby join in to point out he is wrong.
If they are going to be changing more crosswalks to be like this, someone should inform the cops, because they seem completely unaware and are the worst offenders of this.
You're lucky
By Matthew
Thu, 08/21/2014 - 7:42pm
No matter how right you are (and you are), most cops would probably go all Ferguson on you. Which is terribly wrong, but we've trained our police in this country to be absolute animals, rather than thinking human beings. It's a big problem.
Did you get his info? There's supposed to be retraining for police officers. Money allocated, last year, to help educate on these kinds of transportation issues.
I think that a lot of the
By Matt_R
Fri, 08/22/2014 - 9:03am
I think that a lot of the problems in Boston come from the shortness of the pedestrian signals vs the length of Green Lights for cars. It takes far more than 15 seconds to cross Comm Ave and Harvard, or Huntington and Belvidere, but very often that's all we've got, while it's ages before the cars have to stop again -- which I don't understand because people in cars are in climate-controlled bubbles and their drivers don't get tired from the distance they travel.
The other big thing is that Boston drivers have no idea what yellow lights are. They know a yellow means it's going to be red soon, so they speed up or end up stopping in the crosswalk, forcing pedestrians into the intersection. I've heard that a New York second is the time between the light turning green and the car behind you honking; a Boston minute, I've found, is the time between the light turning red and cars stopping. When the light has changed and the cars and cyclists don't stop -- that can eat up most of the crossing signal right there and when the light turns green again, there are still loads of pedestrians trying to stop. I see this all the time on Harvard Avenue.
As for cops. I think they'd be better off on foot. They'd interact with the communities they were patrolling more, as opposed to being isolated in a cruiser.
Definitely safe...for vehicles.
By anon
Fri, 08/22/2014 - 12:11am
Remember this horrible accident? http://www.universalhub.com/2014/bus-hits-woman-up...
It was with one of those lights. The woman was crossing during the walk signal. The only way to be hit by the 41 bus on that part of the street is when the bus turns left from Dudley Street, on its green light that gives a simultaneous walk signal to people looking to cross Columbia.
I remember reading something about how the crossing signals were going to be investigated. I walk through that intersection nearly every day and the only thing that's changed is that sometimes the red light for cars on Columbia is a little shorter. Pedestrians still have to cross with the threat of vehicles potentially mowing us down.
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