Hacker News Reader

Comment by darklajid | Hacker News Reader

For me the most interesting piece in that article was the image of a crossing where pedestrians can actually walk _across_ the crossing (like, diagonally) instead of just a single street.

Haven't seen those anywhere here and I assume those are actually kind of nasty for car traffic (since .. all directions need to stop). Fascinating :)

View on HN

They are called scrambles, there are a few in the UK but they are much more common in Japan. As you surmised they only really make sense when there are a large number of pedestrians and vehicular traffic has a low priority.

When I took traffic engineering at university we were taught that crossing layouts like this where pedestrians can move more freely are statistically much safer as drivers drive much more carefully. Another example is Exhibition Road, where the entire road is shared between pedestrians and cars.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhibition_Road

Many intersections (like California/Alaska Junction in West Seattle) have all-way pedestrian crosses, which are safer when you think about it (can walk diagonal, no worries about right turns).

Edinburgh uses them quite a bit. The problem is that these mean a different way of traffic flow. Usually, you do asynchronous switching, meaning all in one direction, then all in the other etc. Here however, you have to switch differently. All directions pedestrians → Car direction 1 → Car direction 2 (or have loads of cars that want to turn block each other in the middle of a junction.)

That picture is of Oxford Circus, one of the busiest intersections in the UK. There are very few crossings similar to that one here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_Circus

Obligatory Shibuya video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVXuN28Ismk

Reply on news.ycombinator.com