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Citizen complaint of the day: Shambling hordes of dumbphone addled zombies
By adamg on Wed, 11/06/2013 - 1:22pm
A fuming citizen spokes up about the situation on High Street downtown:
How is it that a legally operating cyclist gets followed and screamed at for riding through a GREEN light? Because the shamlbling hoards [sic] of dumbphone addled zombies at this intersection don't understand that merely shambling into the intersection without looking first does not give them automatic right of way and license to jaywalk. This intersection needs two things: It needs more and longer pedestrian cycles and it needs some enforcement of jaywalking laws. Please increase the frequency and duration of the walk light and do some enforcement against arrogant pedestrians.
The city Transportation Department replies that, unfortunately, the squeaky wheel can't always get the grease:
The pedestrian phase comes up once a cycle it can not come up more frequently. unfortunately the boston transportation department does not enforce jaywalking that is a boston police enforcement issue.
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Comments
Must be the only
cyclist in Boston who isn't color blind.
But to be fair i did see two cycle riding together last week stop at a red light, i was in complete awe!
That makes 1 bicyclist who
That makes 1 bicyclist who obeys red lights and 0 pedestrians who do so, in my experience :)
BS
I wait for the light everyday leaving/ going to South, as do most. You'd have to be suicidal not to. Biker..... mahhhhhaaa not so much.
I stop at every red light, last I checked
But I guess thats a lie?
Please put down the god damn cell phone, check your mirrors and blind spots and for the love of god, signal? Is it that hard? Thats all I'm asking for.
Drivers also
hate other drivers who don't use their blinkers (you live in ma, call them blinkers please) and/or talk on their cell phones. However this does not change the fact the majority of bikers treat red lights like rolling stop signs.
Whats your point?
If you're going to argue that the majority of cyclists run reds and state that as fact, please come prepared with some actual data to back it up.
So you think cyclists treat red lights as rolling stop signs, but you've never seen a car do that? But beyond that, whats your actual point in relation to what I said? You hate drivers that break the rules and drive with the cell phone up to their face but my safety on the road is a moot point because you saw a biker run a red light once? Do you have anything constructive to bring to this discussion or are you just blowing hot air?
What to argue
The vast amount of data you provided.
Nice attempt at a counterargument
Except it is an utter failure. You were the one to make an unsupported assertion about the relative prevalence of cyclist and motorist red light running ... so it is your burden of proof here, not spin-o-rama's.
Also, my MA born and bred husband calls them "directionals", which I have always found adorably quaint ... so don't assume even MA people have a consistent term for them, okay?
They're called "turn signals.
They're called "turn signals." You may call them "blinkers" colloquially but I'm not sure I'd take your word for anything. If you can't follow the rules of capitalization, it makes me wonder whether you can be bothered to follow the rules of the road.
100% of bikers are also pedestrians
So you're saying they DON"T obey traffic laws while on foot, but ALWAYS do while riding? Interesting...
Haha, I saw 4 riders single
Haha, I saw 4 riders single file. The first one stopped at the red light and the 3 other riders behind him apparently didn't expect this, so they all crashed into each other and fell down. I couldn't stop laughing...
I saw this lady driving while talking on her cell
And then she crashed into a speed barrier! It was hilarious!
Seriously...do you people hear yourselves?
A car crashing
and some bicycles crashing are much different things. Shouldn't have to point this out.
Shouldn't have to point out that
wishing bodily harm on anyone isn't really cool or funny, unless you're a third-grade bully or a cartoon character. I've known plenty of people who've gotten in bike accidents and broken bones, lost teeth, etc. It's not fun. Or funny, in my opinion. Of course the two worst bike accidents I've known about were caused by drivers "dooring" them, resulting in cracked helmets and head injuries, but hey--you probably find that hilarious.
Jeezus, Lady....
Take a breath and get over yourself, will you?
What I did think was funny ...
It was well known one evening that the Cambridge PD was out nailing people for running red lights (drivers and cyclists). A group of cyclists was cued up at a red light on Hampster St. when Mr. Fixihipster squeezes by, takes a quick look at traffic, and then hits the pedals to speed up through the intersection.
He had to lock it up and skid when the bike cop - the one we all knew was hanging out in the fire hydrant space - stepped out to make him pull over.
All us geezers had a good laugh at his expense. You can't be obliviously fixated on speed if you are going to last very long biking in the city.
Maybe look where you're going
Maybe look where you're going rather than crash into people?
Yes. Pedestrians should look where they are going.
They should also learn that "white guy" means walk and RED HAND means DO NOT WALK.
Although looking up from one's phone is such a difficult chore ...
True, but when "white guy" is
True, but when "white guy" is only around for five seconds, that's a problem.
OK, this has nothing to do with this complaint whatsoever
But I watched something yesterday afternoon that was just awesome to see, in a can't-not-look-at-a-crash sort of way:
I was on Washington Street in Newtonville, about to turn right onto Walnut. The lights were red in both directions for pedestrians to cross. Simultaneously, two bicyclists zoomed through the lights, one from my direction, one from our left, neither slowing in the least. At the last micro-second the guy going my way swerved just enough to avoid being T-boned by the other bicyclist. Was quite amazing.
Uh-oh...
Adam, DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU HAVE STARTED?!?! Now this will become a 30-reply post, complete with butthurt and mental wanking about whether bicyclists are deranged lunatics, or whether car drivers are Teh Worst Thing To Ever Happen.
Or maybe, for once, the
Or maybe, for once, the cyclists and the drivers will finally unite to conquer the true scourge of the streets, the pedestrians, aka JAYWALKERS. If anyone here can claim to have never jaywalked, I would be amazed, plus slightly skeptical that they understand what the rules actually entail.
To the selfish driver: slow down
Without pedestrians, the city would be a lifeless husk. You should be thanking them for being there, instead of Boston being a desolate, shitty city like New Haven or Buffalo where nobody walks because it ain't worth being there.
If you don't like seeing people on the street, then move away into some exurban hellhole.
Walking is not a crime. Driving a two ton vehicle recklessly is.
Dearest Matthew
Please take your jaywalking act to Calgary, Portland, Vancouver, or just about any city in Europe.
If you aren't run over, you will be ticketed. And you can give your precious little lectures to the cop that stops you.
Maybe you should do that remedial kindergarten thing about taking turns, too.
To "no one in particular"
When pedestrian infrastructure is not outright atrocious or maliciously designed in Boston, then maybe I will consider caring about the little walking man symbol -- which does not protect me against red-light running reckless motorists anyway.
Until then, "ticketing" would constitute discrimination against pedestrians.
Which is why it's not done in this city. Welcome to Boston.
Maybe you should remember your kindergarten lessons about not bullying, and not shoving your way through other people just because you are bigger and more powerful than them.
Please reread the complaint
Bullying of cyclists by pedestrians was the reason for it.
Cool, I get to make this link again!
This is relevant-ish:
http://radioboston.wbur.org/2010/05/10/walk-buttons
As per the article, when you have a system it is inconsistent, unpredictable, and doesn't serve well, everyone starts to ignore it.
Signal lights engineering of Boston have only been calculated (and poorly) for cars while almost nothing for pedestrians. Whose idea to make buttons that does nothing? Or when the parallel traffic light is green and the road to cross is red, why does the walk signal stays red? When the system is like that, no wonder why no one give any heed to signal lights.
Boston would gain a lot if it just following even Cambridge's level of planning and implementation much less other better systems in other cities.
---
That said, more directly to Matthew than to the Walk Signal topic. I'm pretty sure Peter's comment of Cyclist and cars to unite to take down pedestrians was sarcasm. I think we should focus that traffic signal system should be fixed rather than calling out drivers on UHub. That's just antagonizing when the original poster was posting sarcastically.
As a traffic engineer,
As a traffic engineer,
Many walk buttons are not functional because the walk phase comes on automatically. The button is still present for psychological reasons - the same reasons elevators have door close buttons: it makes the user feel like they are actually doing something.
And generally the walk signal doesn't come on every time any direction has a red light is because there are often still other conflicting movements like left turns.
Doesn't explain the "we can't program our lights" response
Just frankly ridiculous that they would imply that they can't possibly change the cycle!
But this is the key problem in the South Station area generally: tens of thousands of pedestrians (and that is not exaggerated) using an intersection every day are expected to wait for vehicular traffic that is pretty light (likely in the hundreds or low thousands of vehicles a day) at this location.
That has nothing to do with "the signal cycle" and everything to do with traffic engineers (not necessarily you, but many traffic engineers) who simply don't understand the shear volume of people who move through an area on foot because they just.have.not.ever.thought.about.that.
Many are simply not trained to think beyond the amount of time it takes a person to cross a street when considering pedestrian time in a traffic cycle. It isn't on their radar to consider tens of thousands of people needing to get through an area on foot.
That's the problem - traffic engineers in the US frequently fail to account for or even consider foot traffic in their designs - so you get 30 seconds out of three minutes to move fifty times the number of people as need to move through via motorized vehicle because "that's the standard" or some other crap. You thus get people spilling off the curb and people jaywalking when there are no cars coming through, who then pitch fits because they get yelled at when they step in front of cyclists who are legally proceeding with the green light, etc.
So, as a traffic engineer you need to inform yourself and your peers that the central purpose of your job is to move people, not motorized objects (my late father the traffic engineer was pretty keen on that point when training recent graduates).
New Haven certainly has scary
New Haven certainly has scary and car-oriented parts. But it also has plenty of pedestrian-friendly areas. http://goo.gl/maps/yDo2V
Hey I thought I was the
Hey I thought I was the master of trolling news headlines for comments and pageviews?
Ah I know where you were headed..
…to Howell's coffee on Walnut Street. That's George Howell, formerly of Boston's beloved Coffee Connection. I'm glad to see you're going for the high quality, independent coffee establishment rather than drinking that suckass dunkin donuts crap.
( ;) )
Wrong town for that complaint
This is Boston, where jaywalking and double parking are pretty much constitutional rights, but bikes are menaces to society.
Goodbye
I'm going to go get my gums scraped rather than read this comment thread.
this is fun.
this is fun.
I am, at times, a pedestrian, a driver, and a cyclist in the city. When I am any one I always find the other two annoying. The least annoying, over-all: cyclists. Although that is *not* true on message boards.
The most annoying: pedestrians. Some, most likely visiting from elsewhere, believe that they always have the right of way when stepping into a crosswalk. this is true, of course, only if there are no signals. I am sincerely surprised that we do not read almost daily of them being splattered across the hood of a car.
Oh, and taxi drivers. They are soulless.
Annoying?
The city doesn't exist without pedestrians. Get used to it.
Oh, and the most frequent moving violation, by far, is failure of driver to yield to pedestrian in a crosswalk (unsignaled). It's never enforced in Boston, but it happens all the time.
Save your crocodile tears about drivers mildly inconvenienced by having to slow down every so often. Every day, I watch as pedestrians are intimidated, buzzed, or threatened by impatient drivers blasting through crosswalks when they are supposed to stop.
These same drivers are probably whining about how they had to slow down a little bit to let someone cross, while blowing through a crosswalk where a child is waiting.
Just yesterday I watched a crosswalk in front of a polling station where I was at, for hours. I would say that upwards of two-thirds of the drivers didn't stop, didn't yield, and didn't even look for the pedestrians trying to get back and forth to the station.
At one point, a small child was waiting on the corner while cars buzzed by. Eventually, she was boxed in by a right-turning vehicle that was not looking either, and I had to intervene and stop traffic to let her cross.
That's a bit more than "annoying." That's dangerous. Boston drivers are self-entitled assholes.
P.S. Oddly enough, it is usually the taxi drivers who are most likely to stop for a pedestrian in a crosswalk. Go figure.
boston drivers and ...
pedestrians.
Get off your freaking high horse, already. Most cyclists and pedestrians are also drivers, and the bar is set low for licensing.
It's a Masshole problem, generally. It ends when all modes get ticketed and compelled to act like citizens rather than idiots.
Pedestrians are the ones with
Pedestrians are the ones with the right to walk. Driving is not a right, it's a privilege. Operation of heavy machinery on our public streets is not a right, it's a privilege.
Attacking the right to walk is no way to help the city. It will just discourage walking.
Cars have already pushed pedestrians out of the vast majority of our public realm open space. In return, we are promised by law that drivers will stop at crosswalks. But even that tiny concession is too much for self-entitled asshole drivers. The slivers of street which are supposed to be pedestrian priority are routinely ignored by drivers. Their small convenience trumps the safety of people on foot.
BZZZZZZZTTTT!
WRONG!
You are only allowed to cross at SIGNALIZED intersections WITH THE LIGHT.
Please read up on your laws and try again.
I am talking about unsignalized crosswalks
MGL explicitly gives pedestrians priority in unsignalized crosswalks.
Please learn to read and comprehend.
And no one in particular was
And no one in particular was talking about signalized crosswalks in response to your unqualified statement about cars having to stop at crosswalks. Perhaps you should take your own advice.
Not correct.
Not correct.
What is not correct?
A crosswalk gives you unconditional right of way only where there is no signal.
Where there is a signal, you only have the right of way when you have the light. Turning vehicles still have to yield, yes - but you can't just walk into a crosswalk any where any time and claim the right of way. Signals take precedence over crosswalks.
Wrong Thread
Wrong Thread
Edit 3: I moved the comment above. But it does fit here too. The problem we I think we should focus more is not the behavior of the drivers or the pedestrians. We should examine the system. As the link in my comment above shows, the reason we have so much Jaywalking is because the entire system is a POS. If the signals does not work, everyone starts to ignore to now a basic social norm.
The Red Hand means Ulster Says No
If you are from a small corner of the world. For the rest of us, it means DO NOT CROSS (yet). As a pedestrian and ofttimes jaywalker it burns me to see walkers yell at cars that they're in the crosswalk when they don't have the right of way. They should teach this in schools, but the people I see do it look like they have a fourth grade education.
Oh, and 26 + 6 = 1.
Cabbies stopping for anyone in a crosswalk...
Not sure what planet you live on.
I know, it's weird
But it happens fairly consistently...
What you call a pedestrian ...
Might be a fare.
I can't believe I'm commenting on a bike thread
This topic is just too timely for me not to join in (anecdotally, that is): just outside City Hall today at lunchtime, I crossed Cambridge St. as a pedestrian with the walk signal only to be stopped short by a BPD bike-patrolman who apparently got tired of waiting at the red and ran the light. (And being on the paranoid-side of awareness, I tried to figure out if there was an emergency and I don't think there was. The patrolman wasn't biking with the vigor and speed one would expect out of an emergency response.)
DD was
running out of donuts!
Pedestrians
Now that Marty Walsh has been elected mayor, I am going to lobby to become the Czar of Pedestrian Education. After 20 years of haranguing we finally got a traffic light at the intersection of Welles and Dot Ave, with a working pedestrian walk signal (I know because I use it almost every day). Any yet just yesterday some woman was trying to cross a mere five feet from the crosswalk (from between parked cars) with three young children and she called me a b*tch when I pointed out the walk signal button.
Did the pedestrians have helmets?
Did they have brightly colored clothes? Lights? Did they signal?
But seriously, I really gotta identify with this guy, what are we legally operating cyclists to do when we follow the rules of the road as they should be but we are still put in danger by airheaded drivers and pedestrians?
The arrogance of some drivers in this town, when confronted with their reckless driving, is nothing more then entitled moaning. "Oh I saw a cyclist run a red light the other day! He almost hit an old woman!" Cool, I saw 3 cars run a single red light while the cross traffic was told to go screw. I had a guy cut right into my path on the bike lane so he could snag a parking spot, of course he couldn't be bothered to look up from his cell phone, signal or check his mirrors.
We could do this song and dance all day, throwing out our heavily confirmation biased anecdotal stories. For every cyclist you've seen flaunt the law, I've seen a car also break the law. But nothing will change with enforcement or education, so I have to get on my soap box and just beg of you:
Please shut off the god damn cell phone, check your mirrors and blind spots and for the love of god, signal? Is it that hard? Thats all I'm asking for.
I still don't understand why they call them
smartphones when they've turned so many people into fucking idiots.
Me neither, dvdoff!
Maybe smartphones should be re-named "stupidphones" instead!
While I agree that there are too many reckless, irresponsible drivers here in Boston and the Bay State, generally who run red lights, text and talk on their cellphones while driving, it's also true that there are plenty of pedestrians who act just as stupidly as a lot of drivers, and suicidal, to boot.
That having been said, there are idiots on both sides of the equation, if one gets the drift.
Except it isn't an equation
This is a masshole continuum.
The same fools who walk stupidly also tend to drive stupidly and, given a bike, will be stupid with that, too.
I have teens that are starting the process of learning to drive - MA doesn't demand much, that's for sure! And they never retest on anything, either, including vision screening. The failure of our RMV to require even a comprehensive baseline of knowledge and skill is a big part of the problem, and their failures extend to pedestrian and cyclist ignorance as well.
cyclists: try walking, you'll be less angry
Most people who actually live in the city walk as their primary mode of transportation to get to the grocery store, run errands, meet up with friends at a restaurant, etc. To get to work, most city dwellers use the T. Sorry suburbanites, but I don't have a citation. It's based on experience, which you wouldn't know because you don't live here -- you live in the suburbs and drive mini-vans and occasionally ride a bicycle but pretend you ride exclusively and never drive.
Actually, not true
Cyclists are actually the happiest of commuters - perhaps because cyclists cover greater distances than walkers, don't destroy their joints getting there, and have similar flexibility to car travellers - all while getting exercise.
http://grist.org/news/cyclists-are-the-happiest-of-us-all/
http://road.cc/content/news/31477-cycle-commuting-secret-happy-life-says...
Wow
This tread just shows that cyclist are whinny ______
Horses whinny
Cyclists are relatively happy (see links, above, that tie to the original research).
WHO CARES IF THE CYCLIST
WHO CARES IF THE CYCLIST RIDES THROUGH THE LIGHT,THE PEDESTRIANS ARE NOT LOOKING. I DEAL WITH THAT INTERSECTION DAILY , AND IM SIDING WITH THE CITIZEN COMPLAINER. NON ATTENTIVE PEDESTRIANS ARE A LIABILITY , PLAIN AND SIMPLE.
LOUD NOISES!!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKYf36im6rM
High St and Federal St
The signal at High St and Franklin St is truly ridiculous for pedestrians. It's like a 2+ minute wait, and for the vast majority of that time there are no cars at all. Honestly, the easiest solution would just be to make the signal flashing yellow, allowing pedestrians to cross at anytime. It's such a simple intersection anyway there's really no reason to have a signal there.
And honestly most of the responses from the city on Citizens Connect to these types of issues are total BS. If they actually wanted to try to address the problem, they could. Instead, they give you technically correct answers that just allow them to blow off the issue altogether.
Yeah, the BTD's response is
Yeah, the BTD's response is pretty stupid.
The complaint asked to increase the frequency and duration of the walk light. The BTD said it comes on once per cycle, so it can't be more frequent. Ok, but it could still have a longer walk, or a shorter don't-walk. (Or do any number of other things to make the situation safer and more convenient for pedestrians.)
Yes, enforcement would be by the police. So don't just say "not my problem" and close the ticket -- forward it to the police and include their response.