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“I don’t want to see someone die on my doorstep”: Council urged to sort out notorious zebra crossing where near misses “happen every day”

Road safety campaigner Tahir Zeb’s CCTV cameras captured the now-viral footage of motorists hitting cyclists and pedestrians at Britain’s “most dangerous zebra crossing”

Residents who live near a notoriously dangerous zebra crossing, made famous by recent viral videos showing motorists hitting cyclists and pedestrians as they cross the road, have called on Bradford Council to make urgent changes to the road layout before “someone dies”.

The crossing, on the Horton Grange Road in Bradford, sprang to prominence last week after two clips, one from August and another from earlier this month showing cyclists being struck by drivers, went viral. A third clip, from 2018, also shows a woman crossing the road on foot being knocked to the ground by a motorist.

The footage was shared on Twitter by broadcaster and road safety advocate Jeremy Vine, who asked, “what the hell is going on with this zebra?”, while the Labour MP for Bradford East, Imran Hussain, said he was “absolutely horrified” by the incidents.

In response to the publicity stemming from the one million-plus views of the video on social media and the subsequent national newspaper coverage – including the Daily Mail asking if the Horton Grange Road housed Britain’s “most dangerous zebra crossing”, and a depressing but wholly unsurprising discussion concerning “who was in the right” – Bradford Council acknowledged the safety concerns and promised an immediate inspection on the site, located around a mile from the city centre.

However, the council’s decision to improve the safety of the crossing – a spokesperson said last week that a traffic light-signalled crossing will replace the zebra “as soon as we can” – comes over a decade after residents began to call for the local authority to take action on a road where near misses occur “every day”.

Tahir Zeb, who lives yards away from the apparent collision hotspot and along with other residents has campaigned during the last ten years for a pelican crossing to be installed, has told the BBC that he spent £1,800 on CCTV cameras to document the road’s dangers after realising that Bradford’s councillors weren’t going to act.

After four years of compiling the startling proof of the crossing’s inadequacy, Zeb’s nephew uploaded the footage from the cameras to TikTok, sparking the recent social media frenzy and press coverage.

“The council need to do something urgently, they’re putting money before someone’s life here,” Zeb told the BBC.

 “I don’t want to see someone die on my doorstep. It’s getting too serious, the kids are waiting for one car to stop and are assuming the other side will automatically stop too.”

Mohammad Haleem, who runs a nearby shop, added: “A child has done more work in moving this forward than any of us put together by uploading it. We’re so proud of him as he felt it was dangerous and was worried for the safety of other children.”

Haleem, who once took a petition with hundreds of signatures to the council demanding the crossing be changed, continued: “It’s supposed to be the safest place to cross, but people young and old are scared of it. Traffic lights would help a lot, because red means red.”

> MP "horrified" by footage of multiple drivers hitting cyclists and pedestrians at "Britain's most dangerous" zebra crossing

Another resident, Mohammad Azeem, also told the BBC that he “nearly got ran over” on Monday by a seemingly distracted driver.

“There’s an incident every day, I sit and watch it from the garden and there’s always a near miss or an accident,” he said.

A spokesperson for Bradford Council said last week: “We understand the local concerns about this crossing and we will carry out an immediate inspection.

“Improvement works were carried out in 2018 to replace the existing beacons with high visibility LED units and enhanced white lining and the location is awaiting funding to be converted to a signalled crossing and this work will take place as soon as we can.”

Ryan joined road.cc in December 2021 and since then has kept the site’s readers and listeners informed and enthralled (well at least occasionally) on news, the live blog, and the road.cc Podcast. After boarding a wrong bus at the world championships and ruining a good pair of jeans at the cyclocross, he now serves as road.cc’s senior news writer. Before his foray into cycling journalism, he wallowed in the equally pitiless world of academia, where he wrote a book about Victorian politics and droned on about cycling and bikes to classes of bored students (while taking every chance he could get to talk about cycling in print or on the radio). He can be found riding his bike very slowly around the narrow, scenic country lanes of Co. Down.

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23 comments

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VIPcyclist | 1 year ago
0 likes

Many residents of BMDC would like to split away and have a more local council. No wonder when BMDC can't sort a problem road.

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mattw | 1 year ago
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That's the A6117, which is a route into Central Bradford.

I lived in the area at Uni, er ... some time ago. Problems with poor driving and inexperienced professional drivers racing around at the time; and buses were notorious on Zebra crossings. I don't see why it would have changed completely.

I'm say the whole road corridor needs an overhaul to be more of a street.

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open_roads replied to mattw | 1 year ago
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A lower cost option is to enforce the law and remove / prosecute drivers who are unlicensed / not insured / breaking the speed limit / high on drugs etc etc.

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Bmblbzzz | 1 year ago
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The design of the crossing looks altogether hostile, with the anti-pedestrian railings to either side adding to the sense that this road is for fast traffic and you need special permission (ie the zebra) to venture here on foot. 

Would replacing the zebra with a pelican (puffin, etc) improve matters? Perhaps, at least if linked to a red light camera, but otherwise people in cars who aren't going to avoid hitting people on foot are still not going to avoid them. 

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P3t3 replied to Bmblbzzz | 1 year ago
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Railings are to prevent parking on the pavement here! If that was allowed the crossing would be even more lethal.

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Hywel replied to P3t3 | 1 year ago
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Have a look on StreetView - people are finding other ways to park on the pavement.

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Bmblbzzz replied to Hywel | 1 year ago
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Remarkably, no one's parked on the zig-zags. Either there's enforcement or people are locally aware of the problems.

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hawkinspeter | 1 year ago
3 likes

Why aren't the police involved in this?

You would think that the footage would enable some investigation to be made and if not, then the police should be providing their own camera or occasional police presence to stop this dangerous law breaking.

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chrisonabike replied to hawkinspeter | 1 year ago
4 likes

Wouldn't they have to travel back in time though to send the registered keepers Notices of Intended Prosecution?  After all it could be anyone driving those identifiable cars with number plates.

It isn't in tune with the current wokery but surely the most sensible and safest thing to do is just remove the crossing?  Installing lights is just going to create congestion - which unfairly penalises everyone.  Lights won't change things if people are just going to drive through pedestrian crossings.  Which they are.  So it's giving more of a false sense of safety.

There are lots of drivers, they're not all "bad people".  Our legal system isn't getting better and hasn't dissuaded them yet.  Talk of better infrastructure * in these straightened times is clearly pie in the sky.

Don't nanny people, just remove the crossing.  Adults can take responsibility for their own actions ** and decide what's safe for them ***.

* Apart for drivers.  For the avoidance of any doubt I seem to be in a very snarky mood this morning.

** Apart from drivers. 

*** To cleanse the bitter taste here are some cute squirrels managing their own safely levels when faced with some tricky obstacles to cross:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lg5wznn3IBE

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brooksby replied to chrisonabike | 1 year ago
1 like

Whilst that is an excellent video, I think it demonstrates that some people have WAAAAAAY too much time on their hands...

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chrisonabike replied to brooksby | 1 year ago
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And/or they don't own a bike?  (Adding up time spent fettling plus "I'll just go out for a ride...").

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rkemb | 1 year ago
2 likes

So the answer is to make it light-controlled so pedestrians have to wait? Make it a speed bump one instead.

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brooksby replied to rkemb | 1 year ago
4 likes
rkemb wrote:

So the answer is to make it light-controlled so pedestrians have to wait? Make it a speed bump one instead.

Why not make it so it's a camera-enforced red light, unless the motorist stops and presses a button?

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chrisonabike replied to brooksby | 1 year ago
1 like

(Again the issue here really seems to be people utterly failing to slow / stop AND not looking in front of them at all so really solution would be to remove drivers completely, but ...)

If it's "few but too fast" (how it appears in video) then just have lights on red for cars, green for pedestrians by default, but with detection loops.  When a car arrives and stops, the pedestrian crossing lights go red, the car goes through, then lights (after a short cycle time) switch back to red for cars, green for crossing pedestrians.

The following are slightly different in intent (here to dissuade using somewhere as a through route rather than for access) but the "stop the cars, then allow them to proceed" bit is similar:

a) Only one car through at a time with car detection and a button for horsists / if your car wasn't detected:

https://youtu.be/Okb63flApDY?t=202

b) A bollard which is lowered for any car - but takes 45 seconds to lower:

https://youtu.be/Okb63flApDY?t=123

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IanMSpencer replied to chrisonabike | 1 year ago
1 like

I think it was in Spain, Seville?, that I came across a traffic light system where the camera monitored red lights came on if someone triggered them with excess speed - stick to the variable speed limit and you sailed through. Trigger them and sit with the glares and stares of the other drivers you've just held up - nice peer pressure enforcement.

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mark1a replied to IanMSpencer | 1 year ago
2 likes

I've seen that in Portugal, it works very well. If you approach a 50km/h zone too fast, the upline sensors will trigger the lights in the village or whatever to go red. You even know when to expect it, the sign is "velocidade controlada". Fortunately, when a group of us rode the N2 end to end, we were never fast enough to trigger them. 

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chrisonabike replied to IanMSpencer | 1 year ago
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Steve K | 1 year ago
4 likes

What is it about the crossing that makes it so dangerous?  There's nothing obvious (that I can see) from the view of it that distinguishes it from other zebra crossings.

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Hirsute replied to Steve K | 1 year ago
3 likes

It's downhill therefore impossible to keep within the speed limit.
It's near a school and they are all rushing to get there.

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IanMSpencer replied to Hirsute | 1 year ago
1 like

You missed some scare quotes there, confused me for a moment.

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Creakingcrank replied to Steve K | 1 year ago
5 likes

One difference between this crossing and many others is that Mr. Zeb lives next to it, a man who is sufficiently concerned about road safety to 1) Install cameras, and 2) compile and share the evidence of collisions and near misses.  Maybe motorists perform these life-threatening acts at other crossings all over the country, all the time, but we don't hear about them.

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srchar replied to Steve K | 1 year ago
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Demographics. The crossing is in an area populated predominantly by Asians and people of Asian descent. Cultural attitudes to active travel and driving result, at the extreme end, in some drivers seeing the lives of cyclists and pedestrians as being of little value.

Before you call me a big daft racist, TfL (https://content.tfl.gov.uk/barriers-to-cycling-for-ethnic-minorities-and...) agrees: 

"Young Asians are expected to reflect the wealth and status of their parents, and cycling is not seen to do this."

"The social connotations of owning a car are deeply ingrained in some communities who see driving as a ‘right’."

"cyclists are seen as ‘disadvantaged and poor’."

"young Asians do not consider cycling to be ‘cool’"

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Rendel Harris replied to srchar | 1 year ago
5 likes

Those attitudes are hardly confined to the Asian community, you only have to look at the number of "cycling's for people who aren't successful enough to afford a car" comments on Twitter or virtually any newspaper site when the topic of cycling comes up to see they are ingrained across a large section of most demographics.

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