Monday 23 June 2008

A Half-Zebra Crossing

Pedestrians crossing busy roads often use Zebra crossings, as they are the only safe way to get across. However, for the car driver, Zebra crossings are bad news: the walkers have right of way. You can ignore the crossing rules : examples, the silver BMW on Saturday, the grey Bristol taxicab on fFiday. But that places you at a legal disadvantage.

You could petition the council to take away the zebra crossing, but that would look bad on their pedestrian safety statistics. So what other options are there?
One option is to replace the zebra crossing with some kind of pelican crossing, with the timings optimised for traffic flow and not pedestrian convenience. Examples of this are common in the Gloucester and Cheltenham Roads, but they are expensive.

What is being prototyped here in Whiteladies Road is a new crossing, a half-zebra.

In a half-zebra, the zebra crossing only goes half way across the road. the other haf is marked "Crossing Not in Use".

Leaving the pedestrians to run across the road with no requirement for cars to give way to them.
If this trial is a success, it will be rolled out to more parts of the city
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1 comment:

  1. WestfieldWanderer23 Jun 2008, 21:15:00

    Further emphasising my old Granny's saying:
    "Those who can, do.
    Those who can't, teach.
    Those who can't teach, go into politics.
    The rest work for the council."

    ReplyDelete

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