By John Fleck

This morning’s Downtown Albuquerque News documents the demise of one of Albuquerque’s pedestrian safety experiments – a new crosswalk with flashy lights adjacent to our city’s Old Town tourist mecca.

The reason? It’s just too dangerous to try to get people driving automobiles to obey the law. Even with the offer of flashy lights to help.

City crews disassembled the new crosswalk at Rio Grande and Hollywood late last week, citing what spokesman Tim Walsh called poor “yield compliance” by drivers.

“City staff felt it would be more safe to remove the crossing entirely than leave it it place,” he said.

The crosswalk, which featured a push-button that activated flashing yellow lights warning drivers to stop, was installed just a few months ago on the busy corridor. But area residents subsequently reported that driver compliance was patchy, rendering the whole setup “super dangerous” and “a good way to kill people” (DAN, 5/15/23).

This spot being having been a regular Better Burque Tactical Urbanism Team (BBTUT) crossing since long before it got crosswalked, we’ve been watching the experiment with interest. Suffice to say it had not gone well on the occasions we had tried to use it. Per DAN:

Such flashing light arrangements are not common across the city, but “city traffic code is clear on the subject,” Walsh said. “A driver must yield to any pedestrian in a crosswalk, regardless of the presence of a traffic signal, rectangular rapid flashing beacons (RRFBs), or a stop sign. The RRFB was placed to notify the drivers of the presence of pedestrians, but the drivers should know that they are required to yield.”

Full traffic signals cost up to ten times as much as the recently-removed arrangement, making it “not feasible for this location,” Walsh added. 

On two occasions when the BBTUT team actually tried to use it as designed, we nearly caused crashes when some drivers obeyed the law while others did not. (OK, maybe that’s not right, maybe it’s the drivers failing to obey the law causing the crashes, but whatever. It’s still a crash that could be avoided by just not using the crosswalk at all. Sigh.)

We stopped using it, reverting to the old, safer approach of just being patient and waiting for a gap in traffic and engaging in what is pejoratively called “jaywalking”. It’s safer to “jaywalk” than to depend on people driving automobiles obeying the law, even when you add flashy lights to help guide their behavior.

Kudos to the city for trying the experiment, however sad the results.

This is why we can’t have nice things.