A simple trick can save pedestrians’ lives. What’s Sacramento doing about it?
A study of 6,003 New York City intersections showed that when pedestrians are given a head start before the light turns green for drivers, crashes that injure pedestrians significantly decrease.
The potentially life-saving tweak to signal timing has been implemented at some Sacramento intersections, but not many.
“Leading pedestrian interval is a strategy that the city of Sacramento is interested in implementing,” said Megan Carter, Transportation Division manager at the Department of Public Works. “It’s on the radar. Very much so.”
The New York study, published in July in the scientific journal Nature Cities, included 2,869 intersections with a “leading pedestrian interval” — meaning the walk signal turns on several seconds before the traffic light turns green. From 2013 through 2018, the researchers tracked 25,608 non-fatal injuries to pedestrians and 291 fatalities across the 6,003 intersections.
The researchers found, a 7- to 11-second head start for pedestrians led to a 33% reduction in crashes that injured pedestrians.
During the day, the intervals significantly reduced the risk of both fatal and non-fatal injury crashes. They decreased the risk of only non-fatal injury crashes at night. The study’s authors wrote, “These findings support the use of (leading pedestrian intervals) in NYC and other cities as an effective intervention to improve pedestrian safety.”
But the city of Sacramento is formulating a plan before moving forward with leading pedestrian intervals, and it’s currently unclear when residents might see changes. Although the intervention itself is an effective and relatively simple tweak to the signal timing, Carter explained that the intersection treatment comes with other costs attached.
ADA and pedestrian safety at intersections
If the city changes the signal timing, it has to ensure that the entire intersection is up to the standards set by the federal Americans with Disabilities Act. The ADA is a 35-year-old law that protects the civil rights of disabled people, including their right to physically access public spaces. Curb cuts and ramps are two of the most prevalent examples of intersection improvements that allow access to pedestrians using mobility aids.
An audible pedestrian signal is another — and that is, Carter said, the main snag to a broad rollout of leading pedestrian intervals.
Many sighted people who are looking at their phones or otherwise distracted at the intersection benefit from the signals that chirp or give a recorded instruction that the light has changed, but the modification is primarily meant to help blind and visually impaired pedestrians. Without the audible signal, blind people usually take the sound of cars beginning to move as their cue to begin crossing the street.
If a leading pedestrian interval were implemented at an intersection with no chirping signal, then blind pedestrians would be at a disadvantage — cars would remain motionless while the light was red, and drivers would potentially see a blind person not proceeding forward even though the visual pedestrian signal was in their favor. The driver might mistakenly think the blind pedestrian wasn’t planning to cross, which, Carter said, could put the pedestrian in danger.
Because tweaking the signal timing triggers the need to update the entire intersection, “It turns a small thing into a very big thing,” said Megan Johnson, a senior engineer in the Department of Public Works.
“It takes something that you’d think would just be retiming the signal to potentially having quite a bit more funds needed to do a location,” Johnson said, “which limits where we can implement it.”
‘Every intersection is a little different’
She said it’s hard to estimate exactly how much more money it would take to add audible signals and a signal timing change, versus just the signal timing change.
“Every intersection is a little different,” Carter said. “The city of Sacramento has grown over decades.”
And the city doesn’t necessarily want to implement the intervention quickly at the intersections that already have the audible pedestrian signal updated, Carter said, because the updated intersections are disproportionately located in more affluent areas that have historically seen more public investment.
“If we don’t have a good, solid strategy in place, when we implement in one location, many, many other communities will ask for it, and we will need to be able to explain what our plan is to implement it citywide,” she said. “We want to make sure that we’re not just — low-hanging fruit is a good way to say it, but that’s also sometimes the places that have the best infrastructure already.”
The intervention could help the city toward its “Vision Zero” goal. In 2017, the city made a Vision Zero pledge to eliminate all traffic fatalities and serious injuries by 2027. In the years since, more than 300 people have died on city streets, including at least 14 pedestrians and cyclists this year: Jonathon T. Slaugh, 62; Adrienne Keyana Johnson, 33; Cornelius Jesse, 59; Vuong Van Nguyen, 47; Natalia Regina Sanchez, 50; William Andrew Akens, 26; Ernesto Torres, 58; Zhen Cheng Kuang, 76; Thongthai Xanaxay, 55; Kaleb Josiah Green, 22; Kimberly Lynn Pickett, 60; Parris Shauntel Windham, 41; Michael Driskell, 78; and Ricky Ray Reyes, 19.
