An old idea to make cities more pedestrian-friendly: pedestrian scrambles | Hacker News Reader

An old idea to make cities more pedestrian-friendly: pedestrian scrambles

governing.com

189 pointscurtis154 comments

Getting feet on the street is probably one of the most impactful things a city can do. It reduces pollution, improves the inhabitants' health, improves the look of the city (people will demand nicer neighborhoods if they have to walk through them), and it reduces crime (eyes watching).

My wife and I finally live somewhere with high walkability. It's wonderful, and highly underrated.

Of the many things that affect walkability, intersections aren't generally high on my list. But we do have one of these pedestrian scrambles near us and, as pedestrians, it _is_ a lot nicer. It has a rather large impact radius too: since it's the quickest way to get from the left side of the road to the right side (or vice versa), we can plan our walking path a couple blocks ahead and avoid having to cross at other intersections.

But like I said, intersections aren't high on my list for things that make cities pedestrian-friendly. Having quiet, nice looking side streets that connect all the various significant locations is the most important thing.

We avoid walking along major roads at all costs. For people who don't walk, it's hard to appreciate just how loud and droning busy streets can be. Walking along peaceful side streets is just that; peaceful. Miles can whiz by. But walking next to major streets is physically draining and turns the walk into a slog. Major streets also often lack big trees, which provide shaded respites during the walk in summer, and they're generally dull and give no flavor for the city.

The next important thing is having a good sprinkling of the necessities around: places to eat, stores, parks, etc. When things are close by, it's easy to convince yourself and others to walk instead of drive. "It's a beautiful day outside and this restaurant is only half a mile that way. Let's go for a walk!"

Walking around my city makes me feel more connected to it; adds a sense of pride. It gives you eyes on how the city is really doing; areas that are improving and areas that need help. Imagine if every denizen had that perspective!

And for programmers, like most of us here, I can't think of anything better. It gets you out of the chair, and walking is a great elucidator of thoughts and bugs.

Transit is also a very big component in making a walkable city, and mixed use zoning.

These can come together by creating more dense mixed use centers around transit stations, forming many little town centers -- and overall a polycentric city.

Then many people will have services, shops and commercial activity (jobs) within raking distance, as well as the means to reach other centers or downtown quickly.

Mixed use zoning is my biggest frustration with the suburb I currently live in. The city has done a nice job of increasing density to levels approaching that of the the "big city" we share a metro area with. The trouble lies with the fact that sq mile areas still tend to be entirely residential or commercial with no intermixing. This leads to driving since there is no good way to walk to shops or restaurants. It could be so much better.

Honnestly, I'm not convinced about your argument, because creating a walk only part on a previously mixed road requires lot of planning and motivation beforehand, otherwise it's just a failure. The previous mayor of Brussels city imposed it on one of the major road in the center — a wide, full of shop road. They did not put the hard work upfront, so it's mostly a closed road for not so obvious reason with some crummy decoration "waiting for improvement some days in the future". What was a busy neighbourhood is turning quite nasty : it's ugly, shop are closing because people don't have way to get to them, insecurity is on the rise, incivility coming from cyclist are way up, emergency services are complaining about access — so the only "advantage" is the reduced pollution in this specific street. Traffic hasn't reduced otherwise, it's just elsewhere clogging more street than usual.

So I'm not convinced it's the perfect answer : it's probably part of the answer, but city planning need to change so it could be done properly and we're not there yet.

Walking along arterials doesn't have to be bad. I moved from the states to Munich, here walking is soooo much nicer, because the sidewalks on the arterials are generally wider, and there's usually more separation between the sidewalk and cars (often a bike path and/or tree/grass line).

I wish my city was more proactive about pedestrians, but they allowed the city to grow for years without sidewalks in our residential areas, and we can't even pass legislation to get the small amount of sidewalks we do have cleaned of snow and ice in the winter. Only the oldest parts of the city are walkable, newer parts of the city you just walk on the side of the road and people give you odd looks.

Anyone interested in nature in cities, urban planning and new urbanism should vhe l out "Happy City" by Charles Montgomery. A really enjoyable read.

London has quite a few intersections that work this way: most famously, Oxford Circus. But most are not marked in any special way so there's nothing obvious to let you know you're allowed to cross diagonally.

I suspect the real reason for them is to improve the flow of car traffic at the expense of pedestrians - since pedestrians now only cross once in each light cycle instead of twice!

A more worrying recent trend (also in London) is to remove the pedestrian signals all together. Rather confusing when you first ecounter it - I guess you're just supposed to cross with the vehicle signals or "when it's clear".

I wonder whether the Oxford Circus crossing is actually just an attempt to reduce the number of pedestrians walking around the outside edges of the junction - it's pretty disorientating coming out of the Tube and not knowing which corner you're on, and the entrances seem to get in the way of pedestrian traffic trying to cross non-diagonally.

Relevant difference between UK and American pedestrian lights: When you see the "Green man" in the UK, the cars will not cross your walkway. Contrast the US, where cars can and do legally cross an active pedestrian walkway (turning at a green light, turning right on a red light, etc - this tends to alarm British pedestrians abroad!).

At many junctions, this means no cars may have a green light while the pedestrians cross - so crossing diagonally is a natural extension.

(However, most large junctions have workarounds - usually turn-only/straight-only "filter" signals - which allow simultaneous but isolated pedestrian and car traffic. What's unusual about Oxford Circus is that it doesn't.)

> this tends to alarm British pedestrians abroad

Yes I've experienced that alarm when in the US! I've been going to cross at a green light but cars are still moving across the crossing. Who has right of way?

The pedestrian. You just have to master "the predestrian glare" of making slightly-judgmental eye contact with any drivers that look like they may be wanting to turn into where you want to walk. :)

I wonder how this will work with self-driving cars. Making eye contact is not an option.

The self-driving car detects a human at the edge of the intersection and hesitates briefly. If the human begins crossing, it waits for them to cross; if the human doesn't, the car proceeds cautiously through the intersection, ready to brake smoothly if the human suddenly steps out.

Yup, and furthur refinements can detect intent, hesitation, emotion, and other kinds of social signalling. (Drivers, bikers, and pedestrians will use non-verbal cues to negotiate; this happens in other contexts too)

The first court cases where someone purposefully throws themselves in front of a moving self driving car will be interesting. Obviously I hope this never happens, but it's inevitably going to happen at some point. Hopefully the sensors are gong to be good enough to be able to save those individuals with no injuries. Though I guess from the car's perspective, this is identical to an animal or child darting into traffic, so this will have to be accounted for in some capacity anyway.

Is there training data for suicidal pedestrians? Does it even happen often enough for a vision network to pick up on those queues?

People purposefully jumping in front of (slowly) moving cars is enough of a problem in some parts of the world that basically every car has a dashcam now. Not suicidally though but trying to get compensation.

Well, the sensor system in a self-driving car conveniently fills the role of a dashcam as well. Logged sensor data will make many accident investigations much easier.

What if as the owner of the car I don't want the sensor data released? Will self driving vehicles move toward a (much of) software like model where we only are getting a temporary license and some other entity can change the rules out from underneath? I'm really excited for self driving cars, this is just one more of the many interesting legal/social questions I look forward to seeing debated.

I've watched self-driving cars trying to make a right turn get "stuck" behind a continual stream of pedestrians. Human drivers will eventually aggressively poke through, but self-driving cars are a little too timid for that.

They could move forward very very slowly

That strategy sometimes works with crowds (e.g., home game weekends in college towns). But sometimes, things turn ugly.

Glare at its forward camera.

That can work if there is also an anthromorphasization (put a human-like face that people can relate too). There was another article talkinf along these lines -- a disabled person trying a telepresence bot for the first time at a tech con saya he did not get the usual courtesy or respect. I suspect people didn't pattern match on it being human.

(I also found "glare at its forward camera" funny and ironic -- we humans have a lot to learn about relating to non-humans.)

It is an option, and I think a pretty effective one in the future. If advanced enough, self-driving cars could learn the different cues we give each other to communicate (be it with a car driver, a bike rider, a pedestrian, or any other agent).

It will be very interesting to see how this dynamic evolves over time.

For it to really be equivalent to eye contact, the car needs to somehow signal that it is aware of the pedestrian and their intent.

I can only hope they'll show old-timey clips on a screen, like Flubber's Weebo.

Self-driving cars won't need the glare, because they will be programmed to respect right of way, including but not limited to pedestrian right of way, or the manufacturers will be crushed by recall/repair/replacements costs and defective product liability lawsuits.

Individual drivers are a bigger enforcement problem.

In British terms, the green light temporarily turns your pedestrian walkway into a zebra crossing. You have legal priority, but some drivers are assholes.

Well, arseholes spelling wise, but wankers would be my chosen vernacular in this situation. Agree completely otherwise.

There is actually an official rule: "Remember, if a pedestrian makes eye contact with you, he or she is ready to cross the street. Yield to the pedestrian." [1]

[1] - https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/pubs/hdbk/right_of_...

Another difference I appreciate is that UK traffic lights cycle red -> yellow -> green. So, given a red light I have at least 1-2 seconds that's safe, and usually more since the timing can be inferred from traffic patterns (cars won't get a green light while there is active cross traffic). I always look more at the vehicle lights instead of pedestrian lights -- I don't particularly trust drivers to pay attention to pedestrians or our signals...

More accurately the sequence is red -> red & amber -> green -> amber -> red, so you can always tell which state is next.

I'd never realized this, even after a year of living as a pedestrian in the UK, but this finally answers my question of why the pedestrian lights take so freaking LONG to turn green here. It may be intended as a pedestrian-friendly measure, but it FEELS like an intense annoyance, and the natural result is that everyone just crosses on red.

At least in London another difference is that you don't often see traffic lights across the intersection from cars, so it is harder to peek at the traffic signals and know when your crossing is about to go (or whether that approaching car is going to stop or go through the intersection.) Annoying.

As a UK resident holidaying in California, I was confused both as a pedestrian and as a driver.

As a pedestrian I learned to claim the right of way and cross when it seemed safe.

As a driver I was unable to resolve my confusion regarding turning on red light. If there were no vehicles queued behind me I would wait for a green light. I would otherwise typically wait for a sufficient amount of beeping from other vehicles to then assume that turning on a red was what I should be doing.

Were you aware that turning right on red is legal in most of the US but chose not to, or did you not know?

I usually choose not to turn on red when driving in the US when when it's busy. I consider it safer to wait for explicit priority.

That's perfectly acceptable if you ask me. I have a cranky manual transmission, I don't want to put myself in a dangerous situation just because I have to accelerate at max speed and possibly stall the engine.

At least, as far as I know there are no mandatory right turn on red laws in effect in the US

being Italian I never assume that cars WON'T cross my way

>Contrast the US, where cars can and do legally cross an active pedestrian walkway

And they get angry when the pedestrian takes the right of way. Cars will consistently enter traffic and try to encourage me to get out of their way, i.e. they've begun their left turn and will continue to move at 5mph through the intersection which has worrying oncoming traffic, while I'm crossing the street at a crosswalk.

I've crossed a few times Oxford Circus before I realized that it can be done in diagonal. It's totally not obvious. Even after seeing the cross from above (on Instagram).

I'm not following re: "pedestrians only get to cross once". In traditional signaling, each crosswalk is also usable by pedestrians once per cycle; no?

A full cycle of the lights involves each direction of vehicle traffic getting a green light once.

In a "scramble", pedestrians would only get one total walk signal per cycle of the lights. In a non-"scramble", pedestrians get multiple walk signals depending on direction, just like vehicles do. For example, if a north-south road intersects an east-west road, in a non-"scramble" there will be one walk signal for pedestrians going east-west who cross the north-south road, and one walk signal for pedestrians going north-south who cross the east-west road. Thus pedestrians would get a total of two walk signals per cycle.

Sure, under a traditional cycle, pedestrians get two opportunities, but each is for only half the crosswalks.

I would rather clearly own the intersection once than risk getting hit by some moron turning left twice.

Right -- you also have to consider left-turn cycles when the cross traffic is stopped but pedestrian signals will still be indicating "Don't Walk", and right-turn-on-red where you're counting on drivers seeing you in the crosswalk.

Having one cycle exclusively for pedestrians, where there's no confusion, seems safer.

At least in the scramble I've used in Toronto, there's actually 3 walk signals: 1 for each direction (what a regular crosswalk would have) + 1 where you can go in any direction (and all cars face a red signal).

The standard cycle has 2 phases:

1. Cars & pedestrians can cross one direction

2. Cars & pedestrians can cross other direction

"Scramble" has 3:

1. Cars can cross one direction

2. Cars can cross other direction

3. Pedestrians can cross any direction

The scramble I've used has the following phases:

1. Cars and pedestrians can cross one direction

2. Cars and pedestrians can cross other direction

3. Pedestrians can cross any direction

That would be perfect. In Quebec city it is illegal to follow cars in the direction of the green light. If there is a pedestrian signal, you must call for it and wait which makes it awfully long and inconvenient. Takes about 30sec to a min before we can cross most intersection but hey "its safer" they say.

Does that mean cars can never turn at that intersection?

If an intersection is busy enough with pedestrian traffic the left and right turns are impossible without a dedicated turn phase I think the traffic engineers can handle that slight modification. The US has a plethora of lights where turns are made explicit with green/red arrows. As a pedestrian I am not supposed to cross when the turning traffic has a green arrow as the walk sign is always the red hand.

Downtown Nashville, Tennessee has these on Broadway where there is a lot of pedestrian traffic in and out of "honky tonks" and other attractions.

To my knowledge there is one of these in Chicago on State street and (I believe) Jackson. It is near a college campus which I think is the reason for the special treatment for that intersection.

There are markings at Ox Circ but maybe a bit subtle http://themediablog.typepad.com/.a/6a011570c131b2970c0120a64...

These were installed about a year ago across dense, pedestrian-heavy section of Santa Monica, near where I live. I don't drive and usually travel that area on foot.

I can't speak for any safety changes, but they're vastly less convenient for pedestrians. Maybe they're mis-tuned, but the wait to cross is much, much longer, and due to both the pedestrians and the drivers being mostly tourists there's a ton of confusion that's not going away with time.

Both cars and pedestrians have a tendency to just follow the vehicle lights. I'm not even sure what the rules for right turns are supposed to be.

Given the blindingly obvious solution for the area of converting the narrow, crowded roads to one-way and/or no-turns, this has not turned out well. There was a trial at a single intersection about a year before the broader changeover that was a complete mess, but I guess it was one of those fake trials with a predetermined outcome because it didn't stop the broader roll-out.

The one in Venice at Windward seems to work pretty well. I haven’t seen the SM ones yet. I wonder if it’s just poor implementation - signage, control system timing, and sensors could maybe help.

I just avoid driving on 4th and 2nd now, which I have come to decide is the only real advantage to these scrambles: locals learn to avoid them (when walking or driving), resulting in slightly less traffic?

They do seem to only get installed in heavily touristy areas.

I'm actually a fan of them but I agree that the city didn't install them correctly. Probably the biggest mistake was allowing bicycles the right of way during pedestrian crossing at the 4th and Colorado intersection. That just turns the whole thing into a game of frogger and encourages cyclists to run red lights at full speed at the other Scrambles, where they do not have the right of way.

Nifty, today I learned about the concept of a pedestrian scramble, interesting.

Speaking about cities becoming more pedestrian-friendly, Barcelona in Spain is currently experimenting with something they call "Superblocks" which is supposed to "give streets back to residents".

- https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/may/17/superblocks-r...

- Previous HN submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12237966

Makes perfect sense...

Even just closing a few streets to traffic would be neat...

I walk along Union, Polk or Filmore in San Francisco and marble at the fact that these tiny road with lots of shops aren't closed to traffic.

I think you might mean "marvel at the fact"

Polk north of Geary should really just be one lane (with a little room to maneuver) for deliveries and emergency vehicles. It sort of the perfect street for that kind of thing: has a ton a foot traffic, it's already slow for vehicles, and has tons of businesses that could add outdoor street seating.

In Ljubljana, my hometown, we have an amazing pedestrian zone. The whole city centre is closed to traffic. An area of about 1.5km by 1.5km.

For some reason I can't find any maps of it online but it's great. Really makes the area lively.

That sounds like Coventry, UK. The city centre is surrounded by a multi-lane ring road, inside of which there is almost no private driving.

We don't have a multiring road but there's a faux ring of streets that are designed to route traffic around city centre when crossing from one side to another.

There is a highway ring around the entire city though. Long distance traffic that's passing by never even enters the city. Especially important because we're on the main transit artery from ports in the Adriatic Sea to cities in Austria and Hungary.

Downtown Seattle can be a real pain to drive through at certain times of the day. Only a handful of cars can turn right at any given intersection because of the solid wall of pedestrians crossing.

In the U.K. it is normal to have specific phases of the signal on which pedestrians can cross, and other phases on which cars can turn, so there is never a phase when pedestrians and vehicles are competing for the same space.

Downtown Seattle can be a real pain to drive through at certain times of the day. Only a handful of cars can turn right at any given intersection because of the solid wall of pedestrians crossing.

When I worked downtown, that used to drive me batty, if only because there is such an easy and ready solution. I realize reprogramming traffic lights isn't exactly free, but I can't see it being so expensive that it just isn't done. Last I worked downtown was probably five years ago. The fact that this still goes on should be the basis for firing a whole department.

Across the lake in Redmond, the lights have the designated ped crosswalk light that lets the peds go first. But it counts down, then before the traffic light goes red there is a green period when the ped crosswalk light is red. IOW, the cars get a chance to turn sans pedestrians before it goes red.

As an Eastsider, I am mostly confused by the countless "left/right turn only" panic lane shuffles in Seattle. And also street parking.

If there is a "solid wall of pedestrians" crossing it probably means that the modal share doesn't support allocating 70% of space to minority cars and crumbles to pedestrians.

This problem is excruciating in West LA which made me think building crosswalk tunnels could have a substantial effect.

There's a few of these crosswalk tunnels in Westwood.

Or how about just forcing cars around these busy intersections. When there is too many people, they should just ban cars from these areas.

Crosswalk tunnels tend to be dirty (urine etc.) and can be dangerous. I don't think they are an ideal solution for a city like LA.

How about crosswalk bridges? These are common here in Japan. http://photos.wikimapia.org/p/00/03/29/24/45_big.jpg

It's often hard to make them accessible, though :(

Agreed. Not only that, but if they are accessible, the ramps can add another 100 yards of walking or so. I timed it out once, and a full cycle of the lights occurred during the time that it took to cross the ramp.

I used to use a pedestrian bridge that had a circular ramp to get up both sides and an elevator. The elevator needed a key though, so I guess you did have to know where and how to get the key if you need to use the elevator.

Also, the constant stairs are a huge annoyance when you walk the city, especially if you have heavy things or any kind of wheeled thing with you. (And it also holds for ramps.)

Doesn't Pike Place Market have a scramble crossing? I seem to remember one.

Yep! Right where Pike runs into 1st Ave.

As it should be. You shouldn't even be driving through downtown during the day.

I don't get it. How often do you need to cross diagonally? I live in a grid city and so traveling to another point on the grid usually involves needing to do X moves North-South and Y moves East-West. You opportunistically cross whichever direction you happen to get at the light until you only have one direction left. This means almost no waiting time while needing to walk diagonally. What's the use case for these?

The idea is that cars don't have to worry about pedestrians. It speeds up traffic and lets drivers text safely. Meanwhile pedestrians get to stand and wait 50% longer at every intersection, because their time doesn't matter. But the idea is somehow sold as "pedestrian friendly," so for politicians it is a win-win.

As a European, there are a couple of things in here that I don't understand. 1) how is texting while driving legal and how can it even be considered 'safe'? 2) Why does a driver not look around for people who cross roads outside green lights or outside actual crossings? 3) don't drivers need to look at the car in front of them? How can they keep distance when texting? What do pedestrian-changes changes about this?

In most places, it counts as "distracted driving", and is not legal. However, it is rarely enforced, and many people do so anyways. Whenever I see a car weaving in and out of its lane, I like to guess whether they are drunk or texting, because the two have similar effects on driving ability.

I think you missed the sarcasm.

You are thinking as one individual. If there are constantly groups of hundreds of people needing to cross, a scramble makes walker experience that much better.

Famous Shibuya Crossing: http://for91days.com/photos/Tokyo/Shibuya%20Crossing%20Tokyo...

Loads of these in NZ cities. They're easily the best type of intersection for urban centres. We have countdown timers on the crossings so pedestrians know how long they have (25 seconds), which makes them even more useful, and prevents people crossing when there's only a few seconds left.

Are these recent in NZ? I used to work in Wellington and don't remember seeing these around.

Auckland has had a few for at least 10 years. They are used for some of the very busy intersections on Queen Street (a busy shopping street that also carries a lot of cars and buses), and seem to work well. Regarding Wellington, I can think of only one, which I think was put in a few years ago at a 5-way intersection that had a lot of foot traffic and was quite accident-prone; I think it's been successful in simplifying how pedestrians use the intersection and reducing accidents, and doesn't seem to have worsened traffic flow.

Yeah it seems much simpler to me. I laughed when I read this in the article:

> While the pedestrian scramble may seem complicated at first…

Seems simpler than all the other options!

Christchurch has had them for over 20 years.

I know there's a few, but I don't tend to pay much attention to them since they're kind of part of the background.

The one I can definitely place is the Manners/Willis/Boulcott intersection, which as far as I know has been there for decades, but I know there's more, mostly in the CBD end of town. It feels like they may be becoming gradually less common though?

We have a few of these in Toronto and I absolutely love them. You get a more than 50% chance of the lights allowing you to cross in the direction you want as soon as you arrive at the edge of the street!

I would guess it's 75% chance, but I don't know enough about odds to say that with confidence.

The scrambles in Toronto don't prevent pedestrians from crossing the street on a green light; the scrambles are there because there's just so much more pedestrian than car traffic... (I'm thinking Yonge/Dundas here).

Québec City has many as well, but that's because at many intersections, drivers are so aggressive that you don't actually want to cross the street on a green light, lest someone take a turn and run you over, so the scrambles exist for the pedestrians' safety. There, they're actually an abdication to driver-first culture.

Yes, the Toronto ones made things worse. Now the cars have less time to use the intersection and turns are still next to impossible because of the pedestrians.

That's one of the main reasons traffic is so bad in he Toronto core. There's always a pedestrian crossing on the green so you're lucky if even one car can make a right and a small miracle if one car can turn left.

Even without the diagonal they should make all intersections have a pedestrian phase and no pedestrians during greens.

I believe currently we have only Yonge-Dundas one. Yonge-Bloor was removed due to imbalance in utility:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/toronto/bay-bloor-pedes...

I think it's the Bay-Bloor one that was removed?

My mind is blown. It's not called a "Barn Dance", but a "Barne's Dance" after a specific person, Henry Barnes.

Now I'm starting to wonder what other simple, common phrases in my life are actually incorrect.

The etymology of words and phrases can be very interesting IMO. One of my favourites is the origin of the word 'school':

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/School

"The word school derives from Greek σχολή (scholē), originally meaning "leisure" and also "that in which leisure is employed"".

In the same vein, one of my favorite etymologies is the origin of the word "pedant":

"derived from Greek παιδαγωγός, paidagōgós, παιδ- "child" + ἀγειν "to lead", which originally referred to a slave who escorted children to and from school"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedant

A darker one I heard recently is "boondocks", it's a Tagalog/Philipino word that came into English to basically mean everywhere outside the US concentration camps in the Philippines.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=boondocks

I am also interested in etymology. For those who don't know you can type in "define xxx" on Google and get the etymology tree for word/phrase xxx.

It is remarkable how easy it is to find out an English word's etymology, which is very hard if not impossible in most other languages.

CNTRL have a decent website for etymology of French words:

http://www.cnrtl.fr/etymologie/h%C3%B4pital

En français, naturallement!

Well as far as I can tell, "Barne's Dance" is a basically a term created as a pun on the guy's name and the existing type of dance.

The Shibuya crossing in Tokyo has a pretty famous pedestrian scramble:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXtOdSgf6Ic

In the Bay Area, the intersections of Franklin St. and Webster St. with 8th St. and 9th St. in Oakland Chinatown are configured this way. You can easily see the markings in aerial photos (e.g. Google Maps satellite view). The streets at these intersections are one-way, by the way.

Like this famous crossing in Tokyo that you see all the time:

http://tokyo.for91days.com/shibuya-crossing-and-hachiko/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGMBSJAwyvw

That's the one that come to mind for me. It's the only scramble that I've every actually used myself, but I'm a fan of the idea for areas with heavy foot traffic.

Our small town implemented scramble crossings in the city a couple of years ago. People didn't ask for them, the council installed them as a seemingly progressive move.

Overall though, the response has been fairly negative. People just felt uncomfortable adopting the system and walking diagonally across an intersection. Drivers in the city are extra frustrated at the longer wait times at the lights now. There have been loud calls to scrap the entire thing and go back to the older system.

Not sure if it is the same in other cities, but the old way would let turning cars through at the same time as pedestrians, but pedestrians always had right of way, and it was up to the turning car to wait for pedestrians to clear before completing the turn. Gave some 'see and avoidance' responsibility to the driver.

With scramble crossings, all that judgement is taken away and everyone has to stop and wait for the lights to tell them what to do.

It sounds like your town may just not have enough pedestrians for there to be a visible benefit from the change.

Scramble crossings only have the most effect where at peak hours there WILL be people pushing the crosswalk button in both directions every time as soon as the previous batch stops, so that having crossings for both directions combined means less overall interruptions for drivers and less double-crossings for pedestrians.

I think that is a big factor. Our town population is only about 100,000 people. At these crossings, I am often waiting for only 4 or 5 people to amble across the intersection.

I can see that in a huge city, it is an efficient way to get people across city blocks, but here we are simply too small for it to make a difference.

> pedestrians always had right of way, and it was up to the turning car to wait for pedestrians to clear before completing the turn. Gave some 'see and avoidance' responsibility to the driver.

While this kind of crossing doesn't seem to make sense for a small town, my own experience of crossing the road with a valid crosslight in the US shows me just how much contempt there is for pedestrians there. In a three-month visit, there was twice I was crossing the road with valid lights and had to stop walking or I'd literally walk into the side of a car cutting me off while turning. There were a fair few lesser experiences, but those two were pretty clear-cut examples of pedestrian contempt.

In many parts of DC, intersections are no-turn-on-red. When I've driven around DC, unless I'm driving in the middle of the night, I prefer the no-turn-on-red because traffic is frequent with terrible sight lines.

Maybe drivers in your town are disciplined but drivers here can't adhere to a simple zipper merge.

I don't trust drivers turning right to yield to pedestrians. Many do but enough don't that I won't start walking until I can tell for sure. This slows down traffic.

In my experience, drivers turning right on red (and across my active cross-walk) are frequently looking left for on-coming vehicular traffic (at the expense of being completely oblivious to the cross-walk).

Part of me wishes we'd just ban right-on-red outright in the US.

And there I was on the other edge feeling bad for slowing down traffic by putting my own safety first.

You do feel exposed when walking through an intersection. Usually you only look left or right for cars that are trying to hit you. In an intersection, you've got to look behind you. You need to do this when crossing and there is the potential for a right-turn car to come and get you too.

So I can understand people being unfamiliar with it, or in a light pedestrian area, being uncomfortable with it.

The movie Tokyo Drift showed an example of pedestrian scramble. To see so many pedestrians flood the intersection was awesome.

Oakland has these in Chinatown, and they are awesome. I wish they would expand them out to other parts of the city.

I actually hate scrambles unless crosswalks > 4. In a "standard" 4-way intersection, scramble signals make everyone wait much longer to get where they're going. I say this as a pedestrian most of the time, where I'm frustrated I can't go when the traffic in the same direction as me is going. It's also frustrating when the scramble goes off and you're in a car, and nobody is trying to cross.

However, in a 5+ way intersection, they seem to work great.

I also hate when people argue things are "safer" because they stop people from going at the same time that could collide. Congratulations, you've now made people stop and wait, get frustrated, and jaywalk. Trust that people actually don't want to hit each other, and you'll find they won't.

Perhaps your tone got you downvotes. You are correct about delays, if you compare the "scramble" to a concurrently signalled intersection where pedestrians and vehicles move simultaneously in a given direction on green.

Put another way, the maximum latency of a scramble to get to any corner is the sum of duration of both vehicle moves. For concurrent signals, it is more complicated, but non-diagonal latency is no worse than the maximum single vehicle move, and travel on the diagonal has better latency as well.

Scrambles reduce geometric distance to travel, but reliew on "all stop" exclusive signalling that increases pedestrian delay, which has been shown to reduce compliance. Scramble is better than exclusive signaling without scramble of pedestrians, but it precludes turn on red (which is also better for pedestrians, but constrains traffic flow).

There are various safety arguments for concurrent vs exclusive signalization, but the argument isn't clear cut, particularly in the presence of turn on red.

The best solution from trials in UK is to turn off the traffic lights altogether and allow pedestrians to wander freely.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18072259

Making a city pedestrian friendly is not a technical but a political issue, thus the hard problem is coming up with incentives for the people holding the keys. In this particular case they usually have expensive cars and/or employ chauffeurs.

Interesting cultural difference: in Germany, if a car turns and pedestrians walk straight ahead, crossing the street, the car has to stop, even if it has a green light. In the UK (and other countries, I suppose), the car has right of way, so there's a need for a separate phase at traffic lights when all the cars get a red light and all pedestrians get a green light.

Seems we could speed things up if all countries would give pedestrians the right of way in this case, as it would eliminate the need for a separate green phase for pedestrians.

In the US the pedestrian does have the right of way in that situation. But with heavy pedestrian traffic, there is no way to clear vehicle traffic and there is a snowball effect. This solution attempts to alleviate that issue more than assist pedestrians.

There's a few in FiDi in SF. Works pretty well, but the traffic there is unidirectional, so it's the easiest case to handle I guess.

FiDi == Financial District. Most of the streets are narrow as well, unlike say Market or any of the Soma streets.

First saw scrambles in Ireland in the 90s. Definitely a time saver for pedestrians. And if they can get on their way faster, so can drivers.

When traffic lights start broadcasting their schedules, vehicles will slow down to accommodate scrambles and cross traffic.

Traffic lights may even see pedestrians coming (maybe they will wave or something) and schedule things accordingly.

I have one of these crossings about 200m from my house. They are very common in the UK I think (I'm not in London). Seems to be the best way to do it as all pedestrian traffic is crossing at the same time so the overall delay for cars is less whilst offering pedestrians the safety and convenience of a variety of crossing options.

They just installed a couple of these in the Pearl district of Portland, OR.

I think on paper it's a great idea, but having only a few in your town means you need to educate a lot of people, and don't have much time to do it (e.g. as they are approaching the intersection).

They have signs up explaining how they work, but I still see many confused pedestrians.

I've used them but had the other people I was with refuse and cross the traditional way. Leaves me standing at our destination waiting on them to catch up.

Huh we had these on the main intersection of our college town, I didn't even realize there was a special name for them

I am willing to bet good money that you are a fellow Illinois grad

Ahaha, ya got me. Green and Wright!

Near my house is an intersection with an above-ground pedestrian bridge that goes diagonally across the intersection.

The funny part is that I've seen multiple pedestrians try to use the intersection diagonally at ground level, even though it is in no way meant to be used that way

Never used one, but I often feels the burden of having to synchronize to two red lights in a row. You can backward optimize, but well, a legal way to cross directly could be fun.

Yes! This is an idea I've always had, I even started simulating it but never finished it (of course).

It's insane to me to see a car unable to make a right turn in city traffic due to a slow pedestrian. And it's even worse that pedestrians are constantly unsafe crossing in someone's turning lane.

Taking turns will increase latency for some but I imagine it has to also increase bandwidth. With the safety benefits, seems like a no brainier at intersections that are popular for both cars and people.

It's insane to me to see a car unable to make a right turn in city traffic due to a slow pedestrian.

Is this any more "insane" than holding up pedestrians on city streets so that cars can pass? Is it fair to assume that car driver's time is always more valuable than that of pedestrians, and thus they should always be given priority?

If we're going to have roads built for cars then a smooth flow of traffic is beneficial to everyone. The cars that are most dangerous to pedestrians are the ones making dangerous moves to escape gridlock (in my experience)

The Scramble Light is one of the first things people learn about when they go to Ball State University.

We used to have one of these in Guelph, Ontario. I loved it and lamented the day the took it away.

These are quite common in Tokyo.

Hartford, Connecticut has many of these intersections. I enjoy them as a pedestrian.

I don't get the fixation with grid planning...

Why not just break up the grids, making blind roads, and large roads without street parking... Dedicated lanes for bike and buses.

I guess converting a grid to a non-grid is hard. But non-grid cities are so much nicer..

>I guess converting a grid to a non-grid is hard

more like impossible, unless you want to tear down your city and start again.

Blocking through-intersections & pedestrianising streets are both ways to break the grid and better manage the flow of traffic, without demolishing anything.

Shutting down streets to vehicular traffic is always an option. Doesn't get rid of the grid, but it can create new areas for pedestrians.

Barcelona is following your advice with their 'superblocks':

http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/may/17/superblocks-re...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12237966

They have one of these in SLC by the University of Utah.

that's the worst name possible for that.

That's exactly how we do it in Italy, if you're smart enough you can cross at any time, in any direction.

Unfortunately in northern Italy they seem to be a bit more subject the dictatorship of rigid rules, drivers tend to honk at you if you cross at the red light, even if you're a walking on a zebra crossing, and everything moves slower and angrier

Being the cities when it rains the most this is particularly annoying

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