“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”

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.

Railings are to prevent parking on the pavement here! If that was allowed the crossing would be even more lethal.

Have a look on StreetView - people are finding other ways to park on the pavement.

Remarkably, no one's parked on the zig-zags. Either there's enforcement or people are locally aware of the problems.

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

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

And/or they don't own a bike?  (Adding up time spent fettling plus "I'll just go out for a ride...").

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?

(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

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.

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. 

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

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

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.

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’"

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.