The other night, I was walking past this intersection to pick up food, on the other side. Unfortunately, I saw an older woman (60s) eat complete shit when crossing here. I paused for a second, but she was able to get up and her friend was helping her, so I don't think she was seriously hurt.
I picked up my food and came over to this side, and critically examined how this intersection was built. This sort of incident is something I have heard many boomers use to rail against how unsafe modern pedestrian and bike infrastructure is. That being said, this intersection is built all wrong, from the point of pedestrians using this crossing.
The floating curb extension is necessary, because between where the picture is taken and the island is a bike lane. The root issue is the placement of the beg button, which is not in-line with the zebra crossing. As you can see, if you push the button and walk straight forward, you will walk over the floating curb extension.
The floating curb extension is painted yellow on one side - the one most visible to oncoming traffic. It is not painted yellow on the side that the woman was crossing from, so after pushing the button, and walking forward, it is very reasonable that she would trip over this and eat shit.
Solutions are:
- The root problem is the placement of the beg button, which should be aligned with the crossing. This is probably not changeable at this particular intersection, but should be taken into consideration for future planning.
- The floating curb extension needs better visibility - at the very least it needs yellow paint on all sides. Better yet, they could have bollards, but that would probably trigger the car brains a little bit to much
So, what do I do? I want to send my concerns about this to the city as a concerned citizen. Hopefully they would do something, at least some paint. If they won't do anything, I might have to just do some guerilla fixes.
The reason this really irks me is that, although I support bike lanes and curb extensions in general, these poor designs are not actually the best at being pedestrian centered and will only make people dislike these features due to a bad experience like the one I witnessed. And of course, she walked it off and was OK but eventually someone is going to break a bone, get a concussion, or who knows what.
In the city where I live different groups are responsible for different roads. If it were me, I'd start with a phone call to the Main Roads Department and ask them who is responsible for the particular spot and then put your concerns in writing to that department.
Make sure that you ask in your letter who is responsible for the issue if they're not, otherwise you'll get a curt "not my problem" response.
Talking to the local council is an alternative approach.
Whatever you do, include what you witnessed and ask what they're going to do about it.
In case it's not obvious, you're creating a paper trail. Keep it, so if it all goes to shit, you can contact your local representative and subsequently the media if that doesn't work.
If you're feeling frisky, you could paint that curb in dayglow orange, but some jurisdictions might consider that illegal.
Ill do this, thanks!
The only other "Karening" ive done in my community was an angry email to the P.D. for an officer turning on a red arrow and almost hitting me in a bike lane (with green bike signal)
Just bring some cones out there and put them on it.
Anything bright orange would get people's attention, and if a car hits it it won't do damage to anyone or anything
I drove by today and there was actually a cone on it. Ill see if it stays.
Honestly the lady probably called about it after she tripped and they put one up. Totally valid stopgap until they get some collapsible bollards.
If it disappears, give the city a call and check. Some cities also track this sort of stuff live in their GIS system. If you can find their gis server, just look for the road maintenance layer and check to see if they've added a remediation order for that curb.
The root problem is the
placement of the beg button, which should bealigned with the crossing.The root problem is the formation of self-replicating molecules 4.5 billion years ago
The city could add/extend zebra stripes at an angle to meet the curb at the beg button. Not the most elegant solution, and doesn't fix the fact that it's poorly designed in the first place, but...
