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Toronto pedestrians may get to scramble

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[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=BmAe-OjtX6o[/youtube]

It seems Toronto is starting to think like a global city, at least when it comes to pedestrians.

Like many major centres around the globe, Toronto is considering the installation of a scramble crossings at Yonge and Bloor and  Bay and Bloor. This type of a crossing allows pedestrians to walk in any direction while all vehicles remain stopped. The trade-off is that pedestrians cannot cross when cars get a green light.

If this gets passed at council on Monday, I hope that the City considers doing some serious sidewalk renovations at these corners. The area around the corners will become a little more crowded as pedestrians will have to wait for a longer period of time to cross.

To give you an idea of what a scramble crossing looks like, I’ve posted the above video of an intersection in Shibuya, Japan.

From today’s Star:

It will be a pedestrian free-for-all at two of Toronto’s busiest crossroads this spring — Yonge-Bloor and Bloor-Bay — if the idea of scramble intersections is approved by city council on Monday.

Often called the Barnes Dance (after traffic engineer Henry Barnes, who introduced the idea to Denver), such intersections use red lights to stop traffic in all directions at once so pedestrians can cross any way they like, even diagonally. Then pedestrians are stopped while cars take their turns on the green.

Drivers will wait a little longer to get through a red — how long has yet to be determined — but should find turning easier since they won’t encounter pedestrians in the crosswalk.

It’s one of a host of fresh ideas included in the Toronto Walking Strategy, really an environmental strategy shrink-wrapped in a pedestrian-friendly initiative and endorsed by the city’s official plan.

Let us know what you think about scramble intersections.

video by Kashikoisaru

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13 comments

  1. I first experienced these in Sydney, Australia – they really are a great way for people to move more efficiently through busy intersections and the extra wait time is negligible. It’s kinda fun to strut through the middle of the intersection too!
    I’d love to see these along Spadina and Yonge at both Dundas and Queen.

  2. I lived in a small town in Massachusetts that had a “scramble” intersection — though we called it the “free-for-all” and after some initial strangeness, I came to find it incredibly useful and efficient. I’m very much hoping that the City chooses to go forward with this trial.

    One thing mentioned in today’s Star article was the concern that the scramble intersection wouldn’t make much sense at off-peak hours, when there could/would be minimal pedestrian traffic — in theory, you would then have all the cars blocked from driving and no one walking across the intersection at all. One possible way to prevent this from happening would be to follow the lead of small-town Massachusetts and only have the intersection “scramble” itself during certain hours: 7am – midnight, perhaps. And then in the middle of the night, when street traffic is slower, it could revert to being a “normal” intersection. It would require pedestrians like myself to pay attention and not just presume that we know what is going to happen next with the light — but that may not be a bad thing.

    – JA.

  3. JA: Good point on pedestrians needing to be smart. Hopefully, pedestrians might become more alert, but lots of people are pretty clueless now to “left turn only” signals for cars, resulting in near-accidents, honking, and a further hit to pedestrian-driver relations. It makes me roll my eyes every time.

  4. They are the norm in the UK. I miss the ability to cross intersections diagonally.

  5. These are very useful on the busy Huaihai Zhonglu in Shanghai. It was pretty startling on one’s first experience though!
    I agree that Yonge/Dundas and Yonge/Queen (how about Bay/Queen) would also be good candidates for this type of signal.

  6. There is one possible Barnes dance already in Toronto – the corner of Old Weston Road, Rogers Road, Watt Avenue and Hillary Avenue. Because traffic off of both northbound Old Weston and westbound Rogers are headed in the same direction (and traffic splits off of Rogers eastbound) there is an automatic phase that makes all walk signals light up and all traffic lights are red to accommodate the unusual traffic pattern here. particularly for crossing the west side of Rogers. Technically, it would be quite easy to do a Barnes dance here.

    The only other one (and I’m pretty sure its a fully authorized “dance”) I know of is in Guelph at St. George’s Square downtown (probably because this is where all the buses converge and transfer), which also features countdown signals. Though Pasadena and other California cities have them in their downtown streets.

  7. What a wonderful idea! I second the opinion about Spadina and Yonge, both drivers and pedestrians could benefit from the time savings. Toronto has a very good chance of being the leader in the terms of efficient city control and management, let’s support these iniciatives. I’d really like to see it hit even higher on the most liveable cities list.

  8. “The area around the corners will become a little more crowded as pedestrians will have to wait for a longer period of time to cross.”

    And this is why I hope it *doesn’t* become widespread in Toronto. Part of the beauty of intersections in the old city is that the cycle is usually short — say 80 seconds or so — which makes things efficient for crossing, since there’s never a long wait, but also for cars and buses/streetcars (for the same reason). Segregating pedestrians into a separate phase will make that worse.

    Part of the scheme is that pedestrians will not be allowed to cross on a green light. I suspect that is not likely to happen, which means it will negate the supposed benefits for cars (unimpeded right turns), which will mean complaints from drivers, which will see it die.

  9. I think a lot of it depends on the psychology of pedestrians. There are quite a few in Quebec City, and I hate them because the wait must be 2 minutes to cross. And since nobody in that city pays attention to signals (drivers and pedestrians alike) people just cross when they see a gap in the traffic. They really don’t work, except during rush hour.

    However, here we really seem to respect the signals more. When there’s no traffic, we still wait for the walk signal to appear. I always have to make a mental adjustment when I go between the two cities. In Toronto, I wait at the crosswalk, but in Quebec I don’t even look at the signals. I think the scrambles might have a chance here, just because we’re a bit more rule-abiding.

  10. I was recently in Boston and witnessed these pedestrian signals in use. My observations were:

    – It resulted in pedestrians having to wait longer at intersections since you may need to wait for both directions of vehicles to cross before getting a walk symbol

    – Most pedestrians disobeyed the signals choosing to cross while the vehicles traveling in the same direction had the right of way (this is probably based partly on frustration from long wait times and confusion over why they couldn’t cross with that traffic)

    – Pedestrians only have 1/3 of the signal cycle (since the walk signal is only lit for 1/3 of the time) while vehicles have 2/3 of the signal cycle which is reduced from the regular situation where pedestrians for each direction have ½ of the signal cycle to cross

    Based on these observations, I left Boston thankful that we do not have such signals that clearly benefit vehicular traffic at the cost of pedestrians. I was shocked to hear that we are considering such signals and even more confused with why anyone would consider them “pedestrian friendly”.

  11. Stuart’s concerns are worth considering, but I feel it can be simply addressed: we have to make sure the city gives pedestrians a higher percentage that 33% of a traffic cycle. Maybe somewhere around 40% would be good. A scramble signal still means a percentage of pedestrians will have their travel time decreased as they can travel diagonally across an intersection.