IMS_Blog

The Wikipedia article, and a couple of other things I’ve quickly Googled, make mention of the advantage for visually impaired users. Frankly if the difference between being across the road and right next to you makes the difference between being able to make out the shape of a lit up figure or not then you’re probably much more reliant on the beeps the things still emanate. If you want to help, make those beeps louder, taking account that there might be traffic around, you know. The argument that they’re simply more visible for everyone is tosh too. I don’t know about anyone else but if stood waiting to cross a road I don’t tend to be looking somewhere just next to my right hip bone. For it’s always on the right you see. if you stand facing the road, “to help pedestrians see the traffic too”. Er, what?? For starters, try seeing the signal and past the poll at once. Anyway, last I went outside and looked (today) the vast majority of these bloody things are on two way streets. So if I care about seeing the traffic, I might just look to my left too, to see what the other half is doing. Besides, I thought the idea was that we wait for these signals to tell us (and the traffic) when to cross; so in principle we don’t even need to be watching the traffic. Of course a bit of common sense tells you not to start walking simply because the signal shows a green man (and perhaps another shock here is it hasn’t metamorphosed into a woman in some overly politically correct way). You’re probably going to check the traffic at that point (or be a candidate for a Darwin Award). though surprisingly enough from both directions. And all this traffic watching (well, people do tend to do it, especially when their not allowed to wander off or the signals will second guess us)—given that we’ve established I’m actually sane enough (unlike the designers) to realise there is traffic in two opposing directions, guess where gets looked at the most (or even, where gets looked at if I don’t care about the traffic because the signal will tell me when to go)? Yip, pretty much straight ahead, where the opposite poll is—and old style signals are.

The truly maddening thing is how simple all this is to fix. Just put a signal where right minded people want a signal. There are even these bloody things with two sets of signals on the same poll, one simply higher than the other (which at least alleviates the need to be something out of middle earth for them to be at the right height) but still facing the same way—there’s a picture of that insanity in Form Function Emotion’s treatment of the topic from a year and a half ago. Do that, but rotate it 90°, to face across the street. Keep your silly low level, “traffic facing” signal too, if you must. How hard is that?

Unfortunately I doubt it’ll happen. Somebody somewhere has decided these things are a “good idea ™” and damned the practical evidence. So I’ll have to continue to do what I find myself doing now—peering at an oblique view of the signal which is supposed to be for those opposite.