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Comment by canadianwriter | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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