A Walking City
Boston is a walking city… or so they say. And sometimes I try to walk places. But when you’re on foot, Boston is more of a waiting city…
We don’t want car traffic to get backed up do we?
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And since you have to look anyway for safety even when you have the signal, why not just go when it’s safe and ignore the signal? Why divide your attention between the things that might hurt you, and some unfairly timed signal?
Bikey,
Another fine post. I’ve been irritated by this phasing issue (as I relate here – http://invisiblevisibleman.blogspot.com/2012/07/grids-lights-and-why-new-yorks-traffic.html) in New York, where I moved in August. Along the Hudson River Greenway – which is meant to be a cycle artery – there are lights on the few, lightly-used road crossings. They all hold the cyclists – of whom there are many – on red for a long time, even at crossings where I’ve never, ever seen a vehicle cross. The lights continue dutifully to turn red for cyclists even when it’s impossible for a car to get through – for example, when the gates to the cruise terminal are locked.
There’s a real failure on the part of most transport planners to consider non-motorized modes.
All the best,
Invisible.
For a long time, the attitude in Boston was that BTD basically said “watch out pedestrians, we’re not going to make the lights easy for you” and the pedestrians said “that’s ok, we don’t give a !@#$ what the lights say anyway”.
The city has tried to improve things recently, but it takes a long time to overhaul all the lights. Even where there’s no ped button and you don’t have to wait, no one cares. Go watch the intersection of Purchase, Summer, and the ramp from the tunnel. It’s a basic three-phase light: ramp, Purchase, ped, ramp, Purchase, ped. But many can’t even wait that long and sprint across during the all red.
I lived in the North End and worked downtown for a long time, and walked to work every day. I can’t remember ever caring what the lights were. If there were no cars, you crossed. Few streets in Boston are really so wide that you can’t just look to see if it’s safe. And despite what Bostonians like to think, traffic volumes in the city are pretty tame. Compare that to trying to cross, say Venice or La Cienega in Los Angeles.
Bottom line, as the city replaces or upgrades lights, they should get rid of the beg buttons and just have concurrent ped phases. But other things, like fixing the MBTA’s decrepit infrastructure, should be higher priority.
This frustrates me so much! We all have to walk at some point, once we’ve got off our bikes or out of our cars, so why do we make life so difficult for pedestrians? There’s a crossing that I used to use on my ride home in London (Hyde Park Corner/Constitution Hill), on a very busy roundabout with lots of car and foot traffic. If you’ve pushed the button to cross the road, the wait time is around 90 seconds. The green phase for people to cross the road is SIX SECONDS. Even joggers can’t get all the way across in that time! It’s almost impossible for older people, those with disabilities, or young children.
Almost fifty years ago I had to learn how to jaywalk ~ in Cambridge.
‘Nuff said.