Here we have a crosswalk signal that is not ADA compliant, bicycle-friendly, or on a rainy day pedestrian friendly.
Here we see where they replaced a sidewalk parallel to the street with a setback that includes two 90 degree turns.
You can see people are riding their bicycles here and are cutting thru the grass so as to avoid the dangerous sharp turns.
Do you really want children or even adults riding their bicycle thru these turns? Just the thought of my bicycle train of children riding to school thru these turns make me cringe.
Taken from Department of Transportation website
7.2.6 Depressed corners
Depressed corners gradually lower the level of the sidewalk, through an almost undetectable change in slope, to meet the grade of the street. Depressed corners are often designed as an expanded diagonal curb ramp that extends around the entire corner at the intersection. In addition, a decorative pattern is often used in downtown urban areas to visually blend the sidewalk and the street, giving the effect of one smooth pathway.Although depressed corners eliminate the need for a curb ramp, there are very significant drawbacks to the use of depressed corners by pedestrians. Typically, depressed corners:
Advantages of depressed corners
- Give children and people with cognitive impairments the illusion that the sidewalk and street are a unified pedestrian space (i.e., safe).
- Enable large trucks to travel onto the sidewalk to make tight turns, which puts pedestrians at risk;
- Make it much more difficult to detect the boundary between the sidewalk and the street for persons with vision impairments;
- Guide animals may not distinguish the boundary and continue walking; and
- May encourage motorists to drive on the sidewalk, enabling them to turn at higher speeds and making it less likely that they will notice or be able to quickly stop for pedestrians on the sidewalk or in the crosswalk.
This is not a good idea at this intersection. I was told this design was adopted to accommodate trucks, but at what cost to pedestrians. The wide radius maybe okay(I don't like it, makes it awkward to see vehicles making a right turn since you are set back so far from the corner and makes it too easy to go too fast around the corner, lots of "rolling stops" here), but the lack of curbs to delineate the sidewalk from the street is not acceptable.Good design doesn't have to be expensive, it just needs to be planned.
Imagine this corner on a dark rainy night. Do you think it is easy to see where the street ends and the sidewalk begins?
Where is the sidewalk on the other side of street?
Still hard to see isn't it?
Same corner from a different view.
The sidewalk is on the street side of the guardrail. This makes sense. It is okay to take out the pedestrian but please don't damage the businesses.
