Going back to the Puffin vs Pelican debate. Boris is experimenting with countdown timers on far side heads. How do you think the Dft will react?. i am thinking of its pro stance on near side pedestrian heads and Puffin technology.

Does anyone know if a poll has been done asking the public where they would like to see the green man ? near side or far side?

I am researching for a dissertation on the subject and would appreciate any help on the hybrid types of street furniture out there, so if you know I would love to hear from you.

I am emailing councils a questionnaire on how many they have of each type in pedestrian crossing or traffic signal form, but do not know how to go about finding out the preferred crossing type on trunk roads in England. help!

The Dft havn't put out a national advertising campaign on the use of a puffin because they didn't want to confuse pedestrians. Purportedly due to very few puffins compared to pelicans are on the street.

I would say that the situation now( June 2009) is that the UK has more puffin installations than pelicans on stand alone crossings. Would you agree?

If any one has any information on numbers of puffins compared to numbers of pelicanson street I would be grateful.

Also, if there are any examples of a puffin installed near a pelican,which may confuse the public I would love to know of them.


After 59 pages I am sure that the debate isnt dead yet.

Any help appreciated

Amber

Probably, but not in poole where most pelicans have been replaced with puffins.



A351, Sandford Road, Sandford. Existing pelican crossing near St. Helen's Road, new blindingly bright puffin near Woodlands Drive.
I've not seen the puffin being used yet.

Not that I'm aware, although on here and when I talk to people (non-geeky people who don't usual talk about traffic lights), there's an overwhelming preference for farside signals. Of course, a supporter of nearside signals would claim that people generally prefer the familiar, although I think there are very real design flaws with the concept and that they're no that new anymore (first on here c1996) anyway.




I think some within the DFT were never convinced of either its merits or whether it would be well recieved. Remember, the DFT has been burnt before with new fangled pedestrian crossings, such as the Panda Crossing, which they launched in a blaze of publicity, before having to accept that it was a failure. Note that farside signals and pelican crossings may still be installed. Merely, the DFT 'encourages' that nearside signals be used.



Hmm, I'm not sure about that. I'd say in Liverpool, it's true for the city centre, but not so for the suburbs. You'd need to ask the council for figures though. They should know. I imagine that the figures vary greatly from town to town though.

Not sure. Perhaps in some areas. Farsides are far more common at signalised junctions.

A council near me is still installing pelicans.

Welcome Amber and good luck with the research!

It is about time that puffin crossings get researched on and if it is concluded by the researcher that public perception is hugely negative (The DfT is still not confident enough 'to go entirely puffin' even after over 10 years!) then the findings should be presented to the DfT to force them into having a rethink about going back to using pelicans again or withdraw the use of nearside signals making all puffins farsided.

I doubt anything dramatic will happen as government departments rarely listen to the public or independent researchs because ministers like them don't like to admit they're in the wrong especially after what happened with the panda experiment. The only way they will listen if Gordon Brown orders the removal of all puffin crossings - so pigs will fly first!

One of the two Puffin crossings outside York rail station has been switched off for about 3 days... traffic was flowing much better than normal!

Yes yes, but how were the pedestrians managing to cross the road?

Traffic heading towards the city center was queuing back from the gyratory as usual, and car drivers going the other would stop every now and then to let a few people cross... and the people crossing ACTUALLY HURRIED UP FOR ONCE!!! When the crossing is active they just arse around as if they have all the time in the world when crossing.

Other people darted across between the cars.

TfL themselves have found that puffin crossings are safer than pelicans for a variety of reasons. Boris's countdown timer idea, as I have siad on here before, works well for fixed time installations.

But we rarely use fixed time installations in general. They are either VA, UTC or sometimes MOVA. How do you give a countdown timer when there is an external system looking for an appropriate gap in traffic? In dynamic conditions the controller doesnt know when it is going to change. Its either relying on an input from a loop, or an externally received force bit. Only in locally derived fixed time (where the controller is deciding the fixed timings) can such a countdown be relayed to the pedestrian.



The public rarely know what they want. And they certainly dont understand how we acheive it. A common thing I hear is "these lights should be co-ordinated". In the main, they already are in some form or another.



With all due respect, even though I try to fill these things out when I recieve them... they rarely ask the right questions or dont ask them in the right way to get any useful information that can decide one way or another.



Puffins suffered greatly from reliability problems. Even now we are only just getting kerbside detectors that can actually distinguish between a pedestrian and a shadow on the footway. Even then, the consistancy in detection isnt as great as it should be.



No. Pelicans are a crude way of getting peds across a road, but after 30 years of installation compared to the slower uptake of puffins, thats not so inexcusable. At least with puffins you can use much more adaptive methods of control such as MOVA, which will find a more appropriate time to get peds across a road than a pelican will ever do and you will find that they will be adopted more as time moves on, especially as traffic engineers try to squeeze every last remaining bit of capacity out of the road network as well as balance the need of the pedestrian.

If I walk the other route to and from work, I can use a newish crossing at the Ipswich Road / Newmarket Road junction. This is an interesting crossing as it's also a cycle route - ie a Toucan. The ped signals are nearside, but the cycle signals are farside. Why that's been done I don't know, because they were installing nearside Toucans not so long back. Has there been a change in regs?

Derek

People have previously posted about a nearside/farside hybrid on Princes Street in Edinburgh, but I recently spotted another couple in Castlemilk, near Glasgow: here and here.

No. Its one or the other. In the case of that crossing its just wrong - and I hope the local council have a good QC if theres an accident there.

John

Thanks for the photos , much obliged.

Derek

The version of near side peds and far side cycle is new to me, but I will include the version as another type of hybrid

Could you get a photo if possible - have to say I know a few cyclists who would be happy with that .
There seems to be an opinion among those I know, that far sides is far easier when on a bike.

Bong_uk

What questions do you think are the right ones?

I have asked for numbers of different types of crossings so I can see if Puffins have overtaken Pelicans.

However the new version of both heads on one crossing (must be more expensive) in Scotland indicates that public prefer far side heads, and the traffic engineer prefers the detection possibilities.

Would love to know the green man time - 2 different concepts - how can it merge?

Have you ever seen the kerbsides call cancel ?

I like the idea but cant say I have evidence of the facility being used a lot.

Which detector do you use?

I don't seem to have much bother with the AGD ones

All - any ideas on naming the various hybrids of Puffins that are appearing on our shores?

Not so much a Hybrid, but there's a puffin in Porth Madog in North Wales which has farsided CDTs supplied by TSEU. They don't appear to work, and imo, are completley pointless and would look better sat on my bedroom wall

OK, I went the less pretty way this morning and took some pictures of the twin-system Norwich crossing which explains both why they've done it, and why it's daft having two different systems.

The crossing is here at the junction of Newmarket Road and Ipswich Road.

This is how I approach the thing in the morning:

The crossing is actually a bike crossing right next to a ped crossing, so it isn't really a true Toucan, but of course this distinction is lost on most peds.

Approaching from my direction (heading north on Newmarket road) I get to the bike crossing first, with a button facing the way I intend to cross and a farside light directly in front of me.

Further to my left is the nearside Puffin button, facing away from me so I can't actually see it.

The proper ped crossing heads across Newmarket Road, then kinks slightly left and takes peds to the centre island in Grove road. However, the problem is the college where I work is to the right on Ipswich Road, so the ped crossing over Ipswich road isn't much use as it's out of the way.

The Cycle crossing heads down Grove Road and of course allows an easy right turn for bikes intoIpswich road

This is the view looking the other way as seen by cyclists


So clearly here they had to use farside indicators for the cycles. Having crossed Ipswich Road, the cycle track then crosses the small pavement area and then comes to the Newmarket Road crossing and again has farside indicators. It would be really daft to have nearside on the second crossing, having had farside on the first.

Now the real problem comes for people heading north toward the city from the college as we do at gonig home time. There is no easy ped crossing so everyone crosses before the junction avoiding the cars. The official way is to walk quite a long dogleg across half of Grove Road and then over the Ipswich Road and then over Newmarket Road.

This is what you see as you approach the junction along Ipswich Road


Having got over Ipswich road, you then approach the twin crossing on the cycle part. You're faced with a choice of either a press-button directly in front of you facing a far side light, or a press button for the Puffin crossing you can't see because it's aimed away from you or one as far away from where you are as it can be. So guess what happens:





Thing is, nearside indicators for the cycles aren't an option on this crossing. So if we have instances where they can't be used, why operate both systems in the first place? But also for people approaching this crossing from the south the Puffin crossing simply isn't obvious as the nearside indicators can't actually be seen as you approach the crossing.

Derek

Personally, I see no problem with this setup, particulally as the two crossings are separated by studs so therefore should be treated seperatley, IMO anyway.

However, the push buttons use incorrect housings aiui, and are rediculous. Whilst the first one should probably be installed, the last one is very clear as to whom it's for IMO. Are these TSRGD compliant (disregarding the didgy font)? (Also, guess who made the ones in the first picture ).

Derek, thanks for the pictures of the Norwich cycle signals next to a puffin crossing,
I'm almost lost for words, it's such a mess of signals, buttons, poles, markings, surely a simple farsided Toucan would have been sufficient.

Simon, interesting pictures of pushbuttons, this site may have been an early cycle/ped signal experiment which might explain the unusual buttons.

Mark,

Yeah, there's plenty of these PBUs around however, and I believe there's also a set on the crossings at Hyde Park Corner in London which is a newer Elite crossing

Amber,

You may find this webpage to be of interest -
http://citytransport.info/Roads.htm#How -
the link leads to a section called "Just How Long Before The (Traffic) Lights Change???" and if you scroll down there is also much info about different types of traffic control for people crossing roads - including what some people would say is a very opinionated view about some Puffins and Toucans which follows the British liking for naming suich road crossings after animals and also describes them as Gnats (general nuisance all traffic).

It took some time but I animated many of the crossing heads and call units.

On the theme of GNATS's I also have a short film on youtube which demonstrates this - watch how the lights take a year and a day to change back after the pedestrian has crossed the road.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dM3xF3Egm1A

Good luck with your research.

Simon

I have also noticed a tendancy for the lights to go green for the pedestrian (on a pelican crossing) only after all the traffic has passed, with the exception of the odd car or cyclist, so by that time the ped has crossed ina gap in traffic and the straggling vehicle has to stop for no reason.

On a puffin, this tends to go the other way - there'll be a gap in the traffic and the light for traffic stays green, but right in the middle of a huge flow then it'll go red.

at intersections with in built nearside ped signals then it goes t*ts up - with one flow of traffic going back about 150m and that light stays green long enough to let 3 cars go through whilst the opposing set of lights on the same phase gets a green right filter arrow just after the aforementioned set goes red, of which that filter arrow stays on for 90 seconds despite no traffic being there. No? Well, maybe that's just the Microsense controlled x-roads junction near me then...