The Ampelmann store is a typical tourist joint, selling every imaginable kind of crossing signal souvenir, and tapping into ostalgie, the particularly German form of nostalgia for communism. One thing the shop is somewhat light on, though, is information. I found myself wondering whether pedestrian crossing times ("clearance intervals" in the transport planning jargon) were longer under communism. I'd imagine they were, and not just because there was less traffic in those days.
I remember a visit to Chiang Mai, in Northern Thailand. It's a beautiful city, but one thing appalled me. The centre of the town is ringed by a road completely uncontrolled by traffic signals. Getting across this road is almost impossible. Cars zoom around it. You take your life in your hands every time you try. It also stinks of fumes. Such things leave an impression; the walking human counts for rather little here.
It seems to me that pedestrian crossing times have gone down during my lifetime. Crossing Berlin's Bismarckstrasse the other day, I noted that even if I started walking briskly immediately the signal turned to green, it turned red before I could reach the other side of the wide avenue. What's more, even these few precious seconds were not inviolable: on the second half of my journey I had to negotiate with traffic turning right through the signal. I saw a father lift his small son to his shoulders and run to make the journey in time. Old people needn't even have bothered trying. The question arises: is the Ampelmann giving us ample time?
The technical literature informs us that traffic planners assume a pedestrian speed of 4 feet per second. However, "research on pedestrian characteristics verify that over 60% of all pedestrians move slower than 4 ft/s and 15% walk at or below 3.5 ft/s".
Failing all those measures (and schemes like London mayor Ken Livingstone's exemplary Congestion Charge for traffic entering the city centre), there should be more equity between traffic signals for cars and those for people. Car signals stay green up to ten times longer than foot traffic signals do. Pedestrians sometimes only get a cross signal when they "apply" for it by pressing a request button. It just seems that car traffic is seen as "economically rational" and "necessary", whereas foot traffic is somewhat dilettante, an afterthought, unimportant.
Often, in studies, only the motorist's convenience is taken into account. Manhattan traffic police admitted, for instance, that a barrier scheme to prevent pedestrians crossing 6th Avenue by forcing them to walk up the block to the next crossing point was deemed a success because it reduced traffic wait times. The extra time added to the pedestrian's journey wasn't even measured, though, and this despite the fact that 6 or 7 times more people were crossing town on foot at these locations than in cars.
My next Wired piece, running on Tuesday, plays with the concept of waste, something that also came up in the piezo electricity piece I wrote last month, which pondered the use of piezoelectric transducers "to harvest wasted energy in the foot strike of a human being".
Now, obviously the concept of "waste" there is a very flexible one. We only think of something as a waste if we can think up good ways of putting the forces generated to better use. That "thinking up" depends on how imaginative we are, and what our technology allows us to do at any given point. The concept of waste is, in a sense, "creative accountancy". It's something we create by seeing missed opportunities around us. Anti-car urban planners need to use the concept of waste as creatively as the pro-car planners do.
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