New Signals Give Pedestrians the Time to Make Wise Decisions

It’s not epochal in terms of the onrushing traffic congestion that threatens many growing areas around Los Angeles. But a minor change at two traffic lights in Valencia in recent weeks may augur a small, flashing sign of progress in the struggle against suburban persecution of pedestrians.

As part of an ongoing response to citizen concerns over traffic congestion and in anticipation of more pedestrians, Santa Clarita officials have installed trial crosswalk signals at two locations, one near City Hall and the other at one of the quickly expanding community’s busier intersections, McBean Parkway and Creekside Road.

Instead of a flashing red hand simply telling pedestrians their time is nearly up, the $300 devices count down in seconds the time remaining for the walker to reach the curb.

Such devices are common in more established urban areas where sidewalk traffic is heavy and pedestrians cross intersections in steady flows.

But in the new sections of Valencia, the master-planned portion of Santa Clarita, people actually moving on two legs across streets can seem as rare as a condor drifting overhead.

It is the car that rules transportation in such rapidly growing areas honeycombed with sidewalk-free cul-de-sacs. Here, teenagers shun short walks to rise early and drive to school in time to capture precious parking spots. At the Promenade mall, even adults have been known to drive from Pavilions across the parking lot to the dry cleaners on the other side.

In front of the Promenade during one 30-minute span on a recent weekday morning, a total of four people crossed the nine wide lanes of McBean Parkway beneath the new flashing timer. Two were joggers, one was a delivery man and the fourth an elderly woman who made it to the curb after 29 of her 30 countdown seconds.

According to Gus Pivetti, a senior city traffic engineer, pedestrians are more numerous at the signal location near City Hall, especially around quitting time as workers walk to get cars and join the traffic.

“The feedback has been really good,” he said. Santa Clarita will soon install the countdown clocks at 10 more intersections, using a federal safety grant. And Pivetti said ultimately all crosswalk light replacements would include the timers.

“They give more useful information than just ‘Hurry up!’ ” he added. Until now, pedestrians were left to figure out their own crossing strategies and timing.

Even with detailed planning, officials expect more urban challenges, such as increased foot traffic, as Santa Clarita’s population increases each month by 300 to 400 people. In 2000, the city’s population was 151,000. Today, it’s approaching 170,000, with thousands more homes underway or planned.

The once-agricultural Santa Clarita Valley has a population approaching 220,000, already 10% larger, for instance, than long-urban Glendale.

City planners are using a variety of strategies to accommodate, even encourage, additional pedestrians. They’re requiring more bike racks at commercial and apartment developments and building more pedestrian bridges to eliminate the need for crosswalks.

Within large parking lots, where typically pedestrians are left to dodge and weave between rows of densely parked vehicles, they’re requiring that developers build pedestrian paths, perhaps denoted by different pavements and landscaping, giving walkers their own route between store and outlying rows of vehicles.

Every few years the city takes a reading of public opinion online and through postcards. Last year’s results indicated that the No. 1 concern of residents now and for the future was traffic congestion. “We got that message loud and clear,” Pivetti says.

So just as Valencia’s new main streets were built wider than needed for the initial population, traffic officials are also preparing for more of what they call “pedestrian-automobile interface.”

The city has about one pedestrian fatality per year; the last was in November. That’s far fewer than more populous areas of the United States, where 12% of annual highway deaths, or nearly 5,000, involve pedestrians. To raise driver awareness about pedestrian rights, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department runs regular and well-publicized stings in Santa Clarita with plainclothes deputies taking their time crossing a street and nearby colleagues ticketing impatient drivers who crowd the crosswalks.

“In vehicle-pedestrian confrontations,” says Deputy Robert Smoldt, “the pedestrian always comes off the worst. We’re trying to make drivers more aware of their legal obligation to give pedestrians the right of way. It’s a constant struggle.”

Pivetti says such programs -- which include the new crosswalk lights and hundreds of curb improvements -- are designed to increase ongoing traffic education for all residents and the comfort level of the pedestrian crowds that officials know are coming down the road, even without a countdown clock.

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Crosswalk safety

Timed pedestrian crosswalk signals remove guesswork by showing how much time people have left to cross a street, traffic engineers say. Pedestrians crossing McBean Parkway at Creekside Road in Santa Clarita have 37 seconds to traverse the street. What they see, and what it means:

1

Go:

Walking figure is displayed for five seconds.

2

Countdown:

Red flashing hand replaces the walking figure and the digital timer begins to count down.

3

Step it up:

The pedestrian should be more than halfway across. A pedestrian on the curb must gauge if remaining time is adequate.

4

Time’s up: Solid red hand is displayed after the full 32 seconds expire.

NOTE: Timers are set for a typical pedestrian, walking about 4 feet per second. A typical senior citizen walks about 3 feet per second.

Sources: City of Santa Clarita traffic division