Enough is Enough

Sometimes I tolerate something bad a long time before doing something about it. Even if it is something that bothers me every day.

On my way to work there is a road junction where the traffic lights for pedestrians are dangerously out of synch with the traffic lights for the drivers. Two main roads cross at an acute angle (like a pair of scissors with the blades just barely open), resulting in several vehicle movements where the distance from the vehicle stop line to the pedestrian crossing on the other side of the junction is much longer than normal - it must be at least 20 metres. This means that drivers seeing the amber light are faced with the typical dilemma of whether to speed up or slow down, and many choose the former course of action. These people step on it, but before they get to the other side the green man has already appeared for the pedestrians. As I'm sure you can imagine, this is quite a dangerous situation.

In case the imagination needs some help, and striving to keep abreast of the never-ending sequence of wonders that the internet offers us, I have uploaded some short video clips to illustrate the problem. In the first of these, taken last night at about half past nine at night when the traffic had died down a bit, a cyclist gets quite close to a sticky end. This is probably the most dangerous point of the whole dodgy intersection, because when you are waiting to cross the road, as this cyclist is, the traffic is coming from behind you and to your right. Fortunately he has the good sense, or experience, not to trust the green man and to look over his shoulder before crossing.



Not satisfied with my first effort, I took the second video this morning, on my way to work. This shows the situation in the rush hour, when I saw not one, not two, not three, not four, but FIVE cars cross the pedestrian crossing at speed when the green man was on.



The third and final video (for now) was taken on my way back to the office after lunch, on a different leg of the junction, with a medium traffic level. Note the nice men in the van who shouted at me as I filmed them. They didn't have licence plates on it either, tut tut.



If a picture is worth a thousand words, and my little camera in video mode takes ten frames per second, then my three video clips must be worth about 150,000 words. So why go on? Only to mention that we have written to the Traffic Control Unit about the situation (I have a colleague who used to work there), sharing the video evidence with them. They seemed to take this reasonably seriously and have said they will take a look at the problem next week and let us know what can be done. In the event that these promising words translate into an absence of concrete action in the coming weeks, I may have to consider other ways of generating pressure to act.

At the moment I am quite optimistic that they will be able to solve the problem relatively easily, but we will have to see. It is a busy intersection and it will probably not be trivial to solve the problem without getting either longer traffic queues or less green time for the pedestrians. As the green time for pedestrians is already about as short as it can be, they will probably be faced with the need to shorten the green time for the vehicles, which will reduce the traffic capacity of the intersection. This will inevitably make drivers unhappy, but between delaying rush-hour drivers a little bit more and putting the lives of pedestrians at risk, I would have thought the former must be the lesser evil.