The other night, I was walking past this intersection to pick up food, on the other side. Unfortunately, I saw an older woman (60s) eat complete shit when crossing here. I paused for a second, but she was able to get up and her friend was helping her, so I don't think she was seriously hurt.
I picked up my food and came over to this side, and critically examined how this intersection was built. This sort of incident is something I have heard many boomers use to rail against how unsafe modern pedestrian and bike infrastructure is. That being said, this intersection is built all wrong, from the point of pedestrians using this crossing.
The floating curb extension is necessary, because between where the picture is taken and the island is a bike lane. The root issue is the placement of the beg button, which is not in-line with the zebra crossing. As you can see, if you push the button and walk straight forward, you will walk over the floating curb extension.
The floating curb extension is painted yellow on one side - the one most visible to oncoming traffic. It is not painted yellow on the side that the woman was crossing from, so after pushing the button, and walking forward, it is very reasonable that she would trip over this and eat shit.
Solutions are:
- The root problem is the placement of the beg button, which should be aligned with the crossing. This is probably not changeable at this particular intersection, but should be taken into consideration for future planning.
- The floating curb extension needs better visibility - at the very least it needs yellow paint on all sides. Better yet, they could have bollards, but that would probably trigger the car brains a little bit to much
So, what do I do? I want to send my concerns about this to the city as a concerned citizen. Hopefully they would do something, at least some paint. If they won't do anything, I might have to just do some guerilla fixes.
The reason this really irks me is that, although I support bike lanes and curb extensions in general, these poor designs are not actually the best at being pedestrian centered and will only make people dislike these features due to a bad experience like the one I witnessed. And of course, she walked it off and was OK but eventually someone is going to break a bone, get a concussion, or who knows what.
Honestly the lady probably called about it after she tripped and they put one up. Totally valid stopgap until they get some collapsible bollards.
If it disappears, give the city a call and check. Some cities also track this sort of stuff live in their GIS system. If you can find their gis server, just look for the road maintenance layer and check to see if they've added a remediation order for that curb.