How to Paint a Crosswalk
crosswalksla.org
crosswalksla.org
I got a letter back several months later saying that they had reviewed my request, measured the foot traffic in the area on several days, and decided to not paint a pedestrian crossing because there was low enough pedestrian traffic that cars would get complacent and ignore it (therefore endangering pedestrians who would have expectations that cars would stop at a pedestrian crossing).
It's the first time I realised there is actually a lot of though that goes into where to place a pedestrian crossing, and when to not place one.
or, of course, a complete reversal of the car-centrism of the last century, but this quick fix was probably not in the toolbox of that particular bureau.
In my country you can't just paint the road, at all, the minimum intervention is a lit crossing, orange lamps at each side, called "Belisha Beacons", which together with the paint forms a mandatory (ie if somebody is on the crossing or appears to be intending to cross vehicles must stop) crossing. This means you need electric power (for the lighting) and the resulting crossing is significantly safer but more expensive.
Even deciding whether, and how, to allow the simpler painted crossings is a significant opportunity cost, it would require legislation, and the government has other things it wants to do (e.g. sell off irreplaceable cultural treasures to spite enemies) with that legislative time.
There is also the reverse perspective your local government failed to consider. If drivers get complacent and ignore potential pedestrians so will pedestrians learn to recognize that drivers might not stop and cross with added awareness (I actually live by one such crosswalk). In addition there might be a risk factor of forcing pedestrians to learn the lesson that it is OK to cross on unmarked locations.
Your initial no-brainer might have been wrong, but your local official’s explanation sounds equally malinformed.
If drivers aren't stopping for pedestrians at a place where pedestrians are legally allowed to cross (in most countries, the presence of a marked crosswalk does not affect this), then the solution should be to get the drivers to stop, not to stop people from crossing.
https://www.laweekly.com/richard-ankroms-freeway-art-caltran...
Crosswalks are literally used as a signal to pedestrians that this is a recommended crossing point that probably meets standards (that make it very likely a driver would be entirely at fault if they hit you crossing there but also very possible for them to avoid hitting you if they are following the law).
note that pedestrians have right-of-way at every intersection unless explicitly marked otherwise, regardless of crosswalk markings, so drivers should be looking for pedestrians at every intersection.
In the UK they still rely on road tubes to count traffic and I don't know if they've even considered networking traffic lights yet (maybe in London).
But before you encourage others to pursue this activity, you probably want to make clear, to them, notwithstanding any appearance of a lack of humility, the distinction between your knowledge and possible shortfalls in theirs.
That doesn't mean that individual people aren't smart enough to "play traffic engineer" because traffic engineering is so super complicated.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jan/29/highway-code...
I suspect that many may be kept because it's a good plan to have a crosswalk there, but traffic engineers don't have enough time or budget to make all the changes to the road they'd like to.
Given the absolutely abysmal track record of traffic engineers in the U.S as far as pedestrian safety goes, I hardly think you could do any worse by trying to do their job for them.
There are implicit assumptions in highway standards that people don't really understand. Engineers balance cost, safety, traffic flow, pedestrian flow etc. It is optimal within a particular set of assumptions about those things. The public should have more power to influence that balance at a local level.
I agree that this was misguided, but the impulse is good. Ideally we would have simple apps that could help people plan transport in their communities and understand the risks better. The problem of badly designed roads is too large to be solved by highway engineers alone. And the fact that we have so many terrible roads is not a good indorsement of the status quo.
And they generally don't wanna talk about it because lord knows a subset of the public throws a fit once you start trying to draw a line in the safety sand.
I have worked in air quality assessment and you see something similar. A single development usually has statistically negligible effect on air quality. No measurable impact on health. But that isn't really the whole story. Vehicle exhaust absolutely does effect health. It is understandable that people object to that on a specific case by case basis even when tacitly consenting at a societal level
But mostly I think safety is used as a proxy for other things. Adding a lane to a highway can have a safety justification even when the real purpose is something else. Everyone is lazy, and the degree we allow a sense of entitlement changes over time.
I see the moral idea and simplicity behind it, however not quite sure about law.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio....
(so what I'm trying to say - even though I'm a complete layman - is that from the "personal injury" aspect every painted crosswalk is a real one)
There's a lot of "copy paste engineering" that anyone with a little care can do with an acceptable success rate but we prevent them from doing "because liability". So then we go engage the services of an engineering firm which does the copy paste, makes the client sign some boilerplate that disclaims most of the liability anyway and charges a lot of money for the privilege.
This went on until finally the government relented and there's now a permanent pedestrian crossing with signal lights.[2]
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stra%C3%9Fe_des_17._Juni
[1]: https://books.google.de/books?id=eqYI9QTu-y8C&pg=PA92&lpg=PA...
[2]: https://www.google.com/maps/place/52%C2%B030'46.6%22N+13%C2%...
Here's some things to look out for: https://www.stvo2go.de/fussgaengerueberweg-einrichten/
The people comprising the government of the city of Los Angeles then spent time and money to remove the crosswalks:
https://twitter.com/CrosswalksLA/status/1527809785545928704
I'm hoping this causes a bit of a Streisand Effect, and thousands of people around the country (and the world!) decide to paint crosswalks themselves.
I'm going to paint some in my city soon!
Roundabouts generally make streets safer for pedestrians as they slow the flow of traffic. However, when you add a roundabout, you need to displace the crosswalks a few feet away from the intersection because otherwise the crosswalk leads pedestrians directly into the path of traffic.
Here is what the intersection looks like now:
https://twitter.com/RyFons/status/1527776660187119616/photo/...
It would be nice if Step 1 of the how-to guide was to check with the city to see what it's plans are first. But I guess that wouldn't be as cool.
Where else would it go based on where the curb cuts are?
Could probably add a mid-block crosswalk for crossing to the other side. I doubt that’s what will be done, but it seems like that could work.
I wonder--if it's a busy roundabout. There's a lot going on and drivers are looking at traffic in the roundabout and in the upcoming entrance to the roundabout and mentally calculating if it's safe to merge in. At one particularly busy pair of local roundabouts (aka "the twin doughnuts of death") there's actually been a pedestrian/cyclist stop light installed because otherwise you'd be taking your life in your hands to get across the road.
They may be safer and reduce top speed when traffic is low but otherwise improve flow so that pedestrians have less opportunity to cross.
It's normal to have pedestrian crossings at our plentiful roundabouts in the UK. If they are particularly busy or multi-lane, they will also have traffic lights to stop traffic just for the pedestrian's benefit.
This is rubbish. Roundabouts are a lot harder to cross, and more unsafe.
> The rules are only useful if everyone follows them.
Then no rule would ever be useful because no man-made rule is ever followed by everyone.
> Being right is not worth it.
It what? Crossing the road?
But what is “it” which is not worth the risk of being hit? It sounds like you are advocating agains the general concept of crossing roads?
Onviously people shouldn’t throw themselves in front of speeding cars. Nobody in the tread or elsewhere is advocating for that. You should check that the incomming traffic can see you and has enough time and space to stop and then you should cross in a manner which makes it easy to predict what are you doing.
Crossing the road when a car is close. Even if they could see you and you have the right of the way, you never know whether they abide the rules and are paying attention. It's much safer to wait until it's free enough that you are out of the way when the next car arrives.
You don't know if oncoming traffic sees you, so unless you see them actively stopping, is is not safe to step out in front of them (you still have to watche like a hawk), even if they have enough room to stop. This "asserting your right of way" is the it to which the commentor is presumably referring.
The vast majority of days drivers are not looking and/or do not care and will not yield. I've been yelled at by drovers for crossing with the pedestrian light, I've had an entire light's worth of cars make a right turn at speed through a pedestrian lights and had to act like I was going to jump in front of them to get one to slam on their brakes.
"Right of way" for pedestrians won't mean anything until people start getting tickets regularly for violating it. Asserting right of way is dangerous and you are better off assuming cars never see you and will not stop.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/5/29/an-open-letter...
One interesting subtlety unnoticed on the L.A. Crosswalk site:
> The design of the lines and gaps should avoid the wheel paths if possible [...]
Lacking a calculator (no mobile phones in those days) and armed only with a tape measure, a pencil and a piece of paper, I thus managed to chalk out evenly spaced stripes which they proceeded to paint more or less as described in the article. I came away with renewed respect for people who did this type of work.
It also drove home just how important the maths are even in manual labor. Nothing good can come of dumbing down math education in secondary schools.
Can folks killed by these efforts sue the Crosswalk Collective?
I think if you are going to do things like this you probably should also take the liability costs as well.
Crosswalks are designed to create reasonable expectations where peds can cross a roadway safely.
They are designed to channelize ped crossings to specific areas which are safer to cross - so for example with good sightlines, with appropriate stop markers with good speeds (slower). Crosswalks are often combined with other traffic calming measures (stop signs, stop lines at the right distance, road narrowing features, tree clearing etc).
For example, they are recommending adding these at "dangerous" intersections. So for example, a crossing that occurs just after a bend (we have one near my house). This is pretty horrifying, because by encouraging peds to cross where there is a bend blocking sightlines, those peds are at MUCH greater risk of injury or death.
Similarly, speeds over 40mph, you wouldn't generally do a a painted x-walk. Similarly multilane without appropriate controls. For example, they have a crosswalk painted 6 inches from a stop line. In a road with 2 lanes of traffic, you can't have have stopline that close or no stopline, because the car in lane 2 or 1 does not have enough of a sightline to see that a pedestrian is crossing and so the risks go way up if you attract pedestrians to cross in that situation (a car will generally be shielding the view when they stop that close).
The list goes on. In short, by painting crosswalks at "dangerous" intersections (high speeds, poor sightlines, etc) you attract pedestrian crossings there. This will get folks killed.
If a city did this, they might be sued for violating guidelines on crosswalk placement. What they normally would do is evaluate a bunch of things, then do OTHER things to increase safety at the crossing (lots of things), THEN paint the crosswalk.
Why do these guys get a free pass to kill people for an ego trip?
"No pedestrian may suddenly leave a curb or other place of safety and walk ... into the path of a vehicle that is so close as to constitute an immediate hazard."
The problem with dangerous intersections (think 40 mph or multi-lane, or with a bend in road) is that it may be difficult to cross (think at night etc) is that many vehicles will pose an immediate hazard as they come around the bend or at speed when you looking at standardized stopping distances and reaction times.
We have a crossing near me that is around a modest bend where folks are moving at speed. There is almost no time to stop even if paying attention. To paint a crossing here at an unsignalized intersection that would attract folks to cross would be criminal in my view.
That's the point their ego's seem totally unable to grasp in all this.
That's literally part of how this design works. They've painted a crosswalk in the straight before the bend, and the straight after at a stop sign (goal is every 300 feet minimum to have a high quality crossing) to draw folks away from this dangerous crossing.
Rule of thumb is 40mph traffic requires 400 feet sightlines to stop and if you have a multilane crossing more
You could just as well ask: why do car makers get to design giant SUVs which kill people on impact? Why do drivers get this much space to allow them to drive so fast that it kills people? etc.
Of course you could chicken out of an answer by citing policy made by elected officials. But elected officials make bad policy all the times, and you might be justified in questioning their logic. And at some point you’ve had enough and resort to direct action. And that is happening here, not an ego trip at all.
Again, I'm fine with it, as long as they can be sued, their mansions taken etc if they kill people with this. If they don't, great, but they need to take responsibility for what is very likely to be a horrible idea.
I mean here is a pretty well done case study on how hard it is for advocacy groups to increase pedestrian safety: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJlB4eVv2F8
Also, I don’t think you understand direct action. Most people engaging in direct action know the risks and are willing to accept it. There is also a little sense of relativity that you might be missing. Painting a crosswalk might theoretically increase risk to passengers (might, as you’d have to conduct a study to actually know) but that risk is irrelevant in the greater context of dangerous activities that drivers regularly engage in, such as speeding, drunk driving, etc.
LA (and other cities) really need to up their game in adding walkability, the fact that people are taking matters into their own hands is an obvious call for that.
However, if they want to start messing with roadways and won't accept responsibility I'm not.
As to the driver always being at fault, obviously that is incorrect and often particularly so in what are considered "dangerous" intersections. In fact, the pedestrian may have to pay the driver in some cases even if they are the ones seriously injured and the driver was not.
Do you have examples of pedestrians crossing at a crosswalk (which these intersections already are; just not painted ones), and not against the signal, getting successfully sued by a driver that hits them?
https://www.shouselaw.com/ca/blog/do-pedestrians-always-have...
In general because a driver is so unlikely to be hurt, I can't imagine them suing? But these lawyers say this:
"If the pedestrian did not have the right of way and got hit by a car, the pedestrian may be responsible for the accident. With that responsibility comes liability. If the pedestrian is liable, he or she may have to compensate the driver for the costs of the crash, even if the pedestrian was more severely hurt."
I didn't pull caselaw here, because the issue here is that liability WOULD be very easy to show against the crosswalk collective attracting ped crossings to dangerous intersections. That is my (very unpopular) point. I would hope someone would sue them if they had a relative killed though or particularly a child.
Editing to add:
The "right of way" is not automatic, pedestrians have a duty of care still. I think folks are getting confused between pedestrians can cross at all intersections (true, it is not jaywalking even if no crosswalk) and things like a driver is always at fault etc.
i. Pedestrians must use reasonable care at all times.
Pedestrians are required by statute to obey traffic signs and signals. Further, every pedestrian has the duty, before entering a street, to make reasonably careful observations to ascertain traffic conditions to be encountered; thus, a pedestrian has a duty to look in the direction from which an approaching motorist might endanger the pedestrian’s safety, to exercise reasonable care at all times while crossing the street and to continue to be alert to safeguard against injury.
ii. Pedestrians cannot walk in front of a motor vehicle.
Under the law, a pedestrian who is aware of the approach of a vehicle should not begin or continue crossing a street in such proximity to the crossing or traveling at such speed as to constitute an imminent peril. A driver has the right to assume that a pedestrian will not leave a place of safety to step directly in front of the driver’s vehicle.
So technically both are in the wrong, but I would argue that in reality a pedestrian usually becomes frustrated when a line of cars don’t stop (even when they are supposed to). At this point multiple drivers have failed to abide by traffic law. Now the pedestrian ignores their end of the deal and crosses in front of cars, hoping they would stop.
What I’m getting at is that a pedestrian most often wouldn’t illegally cross if drivers wouldn’t illegally cross first.
> As to the driver always being at fault, obviously that is incorrect
You may have to retake driver's ed because when a pedestrian is crossing an intersection, they have right of way.
> In fact, the pedestrian may have to pay the driver in some cases
Do you have any proof of this?
"No pedestrian may suddenly leave a curb or other place of safety and walk ... into the path of a vehicle that is so close as to constitute an immediate hazard."
That is the LAW.
The issue is at some intersections particularly at night, a car coming around a bend at 40mph will almost always pose an immediate hazard particularly if you look at standardized reaction times and stopping distances.
A city doing this properly, before painting a crosswalk, would look at doing things like reducing multi-lane travel, reducing speed, signalizing the intersection, doing bumpouts, increasing sightlines (red curb pain, tree and vegetation removal) and much more. Then once it is safe enough, they would paint a crosswalk to attract crossings to this safer crossing.
People wont be killed by paint on the road (unless they slip on it while wet, maybe?).