Town in Iceland Paints 3D Zebra Crosswalk to Slow Down Speeding Cars | Hacker News Reader

Town in Iceland Paints 3D Zebra Crosswalk to Slow Down Speeding Cars

boredpanda.com

54 pointskshatrea27 comments

This is pretty cool as a trompe l'oiel, but it's just plain dangerous to put deceptive markings on a roadway.

The should have called the project "let's train our drivers to ignore raised obstacles on the road".

It'll also pretty quickly become useless except to people who're experiencing it for the first time.. and for them it'll just be a terrifying surprise

And now you'll get surprising behavior from random cars, and normal behavior otherwise, which is probably more dangerous than whatever speeding was occurring in the first place

My small midwestern town just put vertical crosswalk markers in place on the lane lines right in front of my house. This makes life terrible because I live on 1) a major road right off of the freeway that takes a lot of commute and out-of-town traffic because it is 2) the route to the goddamn hospital. This means that the ambulances have to do crazy things to get around the people who have nowhere to get out of the way due to the signs, and more traffic backed up due to people inappropriately stopping at the signs. I also watched a rear ending at one yesterday. These signs are literally dangerous on multiple levels.

>My small midwestern town just put vertical crosswalk markers in place on the lane lines right in front of my house. This makes life terrible because I live on 1) a major road right off of the freeway that takes a lot of commute and out-of-town traffic because it is 2) the route to the goddamn hospital. This means that the ambulances have to do crazy things to get around the people who have nowhere to get out of the way due to the signs, and more traffic backed up due to people inappropriately stopping at the signs. I also watched a rear ending at one yesterday. These signs are literally dangerous on multiple levels.

But now someone's desire to have slow traffic is satisfied and they are no longer pestering the local government who is no longer pestering the highway department. That's mission accomplished as far as they care. Making the local transportation infrastructure not suck is not a metric they are evaluated by so all the second order effects are irrelevant.

If you're lucky the marker will have a snow plow accident in a couple months and it will never get replaced because everyone will realize it actually made things worse.

Also, it's worth noting that despite the slowed traffic the situation is probably more hazardous for pedestrians because the traffic now takes more of their time and attention.

Nope, they get unbolted when we start having frosts and put back in the spring. They also replace them periodically when they get ripped off by the large trucks and greyhound buses that don't fit between them perfectly... I really wish I could correlate traffic slowdown in a publishable way to provide for wrongful death suits of the ambulance occupants' families against the city, but I haven't figured out how to quantify it cheaply and publicly yet.

I can imagine a motorcyclist absolutely bricking it. I don't find this smart or that amusing.

The town where I live installed one. They cost 40% more than a regular cross walk and are a waste of money. I had driven over the thing for about a month before I realized that it was the '3D' crosswalk and not just a poorly painted crosswalk.

There's an exhibit in Langkawi that is all about this 3-D art. When I was walking through it I didn't notice anything special. But I was recording with my GoPro, and in going over the video I noticed that the images were strikingly 3-D. So I think these things are great for a single-pupil/lens observer, but having two eyes makes the effect less spectacular.

In other words, they photograph well but aren't that dramatic IRL.

In the video from the article it looks pretty realistic from a relatively high vantage point (drone several meter high) but from the regular driving position it's still pretty flat and at best confusing. Is this the case when seeing it live?

Pretty much. When it was brand new it looked like someone had painted over a old cross walk with two different shades of black paint. After a few weeks it got dirty and worn down from tires and now nobody with assume it is a 3D image at this point.

Yeah, seems like rubber wheels rubbing the paint off within a weeks use would kill the illusion pretty quickly.

Uhm … this won't fool anybody with more than one eye. It might look convincing in a photo but once you look at it on location it is gonna be instantly obvious that this is flat paint on the ground.

I don't think it needs to "fool" them, just confuse them enough to want to slow down and have a second look.. In my hometown (Portland, OR), there have been several projects that increase the perceived danger of an area in an attempt to slow people down and increase their awareness. I don't know how effective they are, they sure are annoying :)

Agree. I wish I had seen your comment before I commented on a comment (currently) above.

A better solution would probably be to revoke driving privileges of anyone caught speeding in these areas. Make it very public that this is what will happen. Then do it. I'm sick of irresponsible drivers. If you speed on the railway you could go to prison and never be a driver again. Similar for pilots.

They aren't mutually exclusive. I do however suspect that the cost of some paint is a lot cheaper then permanently monitoring and prosecuting these drivers. Also, for prosecution to be effective as a deterrent requires the driver to make a rational decision about the pro's and con's of being irresponsible, is that a reasonable expectation?

I want to echo this comment from close04:

> In the video from the article it looks pretty realistic from a relatively high vantage point (drone several meter high) but from the regular driving position it's still pretty flat and at best confusing.

The first thing I thought when the video opened with a driveover was "it looks like they got the perspective wrong". What viewing angle is it meant for?

Yeah, I think if they wanted to do this properly, they would use a projector to get the perspective exactly right from the actual vantage of the typical driver, including cancelling out the curvature of the road for the blocks (but not the shadow).

This is a cool optical illusion, but it's deceptive at best to actual drivers. I could see it causing rear-end collisions when drivers first encounter them.

And what about cars coming from the opposite direction? They'll see something that they won't recognize at all as a crosswalk, raised or not.

One interesting thing is that the video at the end of the article shows a car speeding past it (coming quite close t a child) and then slowing down at the next (ordinarily painted) crosswalk.

It looked like the video was speed up at that moment, not sure why.

This is clever, but does it work? The car in the video at the 1 minute mark doesn't seem to care for them.

> https://i.rmbl.ws/s8/2/a/m/1/y/am1ya.caa.1.mp4?b=0&u=8khr

I am colorblind. A rely on consistency a lot when I am out and about. This sort of thing feels really deceptive. Aren't there other signs, signals or actual three-dimensional tools that can be used to slow traffic (speed bumps) that are not deceptive?

The easiest way to slow traffic is to make the road narrower. If the sidewalk "bulged" into the road near the crossing it would probably help a lot.

I don't know if encouraging pedestrians to step into the way of a vehicle is the wisest decision. If a car doesn't slow down, it will infringe on the sidewalk. At least right now, a car under control can travel in a straight line and be reasonably assured that their path will be free of people.

The perspective is wrong I think, unless this is a one-way road.