Can bad infrastructure be to blame for accidents?

[Derek]

Hello Sabre - I'm back. First post for a long time.

I came cross Ashley Neal a while back, he's a driving instructor and vlogger on you tube. A week or so back he published a video recorded in Edinburgh which he claimed showed a cyclist jumping a red light and causing an accident, the point he was making was that such irresponsible cycling can cause long term mental health problems for the innocent driver.



However, he followed it up with a second video which highlights some really bad aspects of the junction, which has temporary traffic management due to road works that arguably contributed to the cyclist making a mistake. He shows the cyclists didn't in fact jump the lights, but seems to have mistook a left turn filter on a far side traffic light as his green. This is the really interesting video which raises the questions about junction design.



The road the cyclist is crossing is a dual carriageway, at least where it goes through the junction. Yet the left turn filter light is on the far side of the right-running carriageway, a long way beyond the left turn lane. The "straight ahead" lane is actually slightly to the left and the far side filter light's left arrow actually points to that road. There is also painted cycle gutter which has a left kink in it and - the worst offender - a large concrete "planter" which actually seems to be a tram stop which creates a blind spot right on the junction. If you cycle you'll know that sitting on the advance stop line makes it hard to see the nearside traffic lights and so cyclists will depend on the far side light.

It's true the cyclists got the light signal wrong, but it was a mistake very much encouraged by the design of the junction and bad traffic management. It wasn't a simple case of jumping the lights. However Ashley Neal still balms the cyclist as being "at fault". How much responsibility does the highway authority bear for this? Neither the car driver nor the cyclist took account of the blind spot caused by the "planter" thing.

[rhyds]

The worst example of poor temporary infrastructure I ever saw was back in 2006 In Wrexham. It was at this T-junction

https://www.google.com/maps/@53.0428477 ... 384!8i8192

The shopping centre at the top of the image was being built at the time, and therefore there were a lot of diversions around the area as the old route went through the middle of where it now stands.

To help with this, the contractors/council decided it was best for this T-junction to become a Mini Roundabout. Problem was, they didn't install the mini roundabout in one go, but rather painted/installed a white circle in the road where it would be and left it for a couple of weeks before adding the arrows on the road and proper mini roundabout signage (IIRC there was a "new roundabout ahead" sign on one of the three arms and that was it)

This meant that for those two weeks it was chaos down there, as some folks assumed the "dot" was a roundabout and assumed/ceded priority with that in mind while others treated it like the T-junction it always had been. They eventually painted and signed it properly which solved the issue for the time the roundabout existed (About a year I think).

As for permanent infrastructure, the A470/A494 Dolgellau bypass junction has to be the worst example I personally experienced. There's a thread Here but the gist of it is that the original layout (short D2 with a right turn) was re-modelled in 2014 and the new layout suffered an horrendous fatal accident rate, to the point that less than two months after opening the Trunk Roads Agency installed temporary traffic lights before eventually replacing the whole disaster zone with a roundabout.

[jnty]

That particular bit of Picardy Place gyratory is really bad and I think is symptomatic of "traffic modelling brain" where they've basically tried to squeeze maximum capacity out of the junction by trying to run different movements at separate times in a way that doesn't actually safely work given the layout on the ground. I've seen cars run lights there and even go the "wrong side" of the island and cut up a police car (and subsequently get pulled over.)

The whole thing was redesigned in a hurry when the council realised that decade old plans for a sea of tarmac with zero cycle and minimal pedestrian infrastructure would not be acceptable in a rapidly regenerating and busy part of the city centre in the 2020s. Hopefully when the trams start running the phases and street furniture might become a bit more sensible.

[AndyB]

I’ve been there on foot twice, the second time due to the proximity of the Lego store and the convenience of the Tesco, and good grief, how many years does it take to reconstruct that junction? I think it’s been like that for three years now - you would think they would make it ready to lay tramlines and otherwise be in its final layout.

I can though explain the replacement of the lightweight tram buffer stop. Buffer zone for the workmen needs greater protection than normal moving traffic.

[jnty]

I’ve been there on foot twice, the second time due to the proximity of the Lego store and the convenience of the Tesco, and good grief, how many years does it take to reconstruct that junction? I think it’s been like that for three years now - you would think they would make it ready to lay tramlines and otherwise be in its final layout.

I can though explain the replacement of the lightweight tram buffer stop. Buffer zone for the workmen needs greater protection than normal moving traffic.

In fairness, I think it's being used as a works compound for that whole section of the line. There's also a tram stop to be built there.

[Bomag]

Most accident investigators I am aware of, or have met - whether police or not - have very little, or no highway engineering knowledge and would not know what impact infrastructure design and maintenance (or lack of) has on accidents. We had a muppet at Leeds MDC saying that a CAT1/safety critical give way marking (barely there) had no influence on over running injuries.

Although it may come as a surprise to some local road practitioners, we have some of the safest major roads in the world driven on by some of the least competent drivers in Europe (as a percentage). Probably the safety is due to the high standards the roads are designed to.

[solocle]

Just was a passenger in an RTC here.



The light turned amber as we were crossing the stop line. The driver of our car stopped at the second stop line - the repeater signal was red.

The driver behind did not stop for amber, and hit us.

But the layout looks like a contributory factor to me. Red light and stop line.

[Rob590]

I walk over this pedestrian crossing on my walk to work, and I have seen multiple drivers run the red light after turning left, which is when the crossing sequence is set.

The issue, I'm sure, is that on turning left they see the red light and presume it's part of the junction infrastructure, signing red to the lights behind them. The stop line should be enough but I can see how drivers are not ready for it, or are busy looking at other elements of the junction and miss it. There is a warning sign behind them, but why it is a generic exclamation mark and not a pedestrian crossing sign I don't know, and I can see how it could be missed if waiting behind a bus or HGV.

I've seen far more cars run this red light than on any other junction I've ever seen, and there's no particular reason to imagine that discipline is worse at this particular point than elsewhere. While it is ultimately the driver's fault, the road design - like the design in the original post - is such that it's much easier for an inattentive or distracted driver to make a potentially fatal error.

[JohnnyMo]

Have a quick look at this junction, are you clear to turn left ?

[jabbaboy]

Not a fan of this roundabout in Sunderland

https://www.google.com/maps/@54.9031825 ... 384!8i8192

The traffic light behind has a box on, catch 22 it points directly at the junction where it's not meant to be seen.

[jnty]

Have a quick look at this junction, are you clear to turn left ?

I see three green balls, think I'm clear to go straight on and right too.

Bit facetious but certainly not hard to imagine making that mistake going straight on if there was a lorry waiting to turn right and the left hand red light was out/obscured/knocked round.

[Mark Hewitt]

Just was a passenger in an RTC here.



The light turned amber as we were crossing the stop line. The driver of our car stopped at the second stop line - the repeater signal was red.

The driver behind did not stop for amber, and hit us.

But the layout looks like a contributory factor to me. Red light and stop line.

"AMBER means ‘Stop’ at the stop line. You may go on only if the AMBER appears after you have crossed the stop line or are so close to it that to pull up might cause an accident!"

I would go 50/50 on that one.

[Glen]

Have a quick look at this junction, are you clear to turn left ?

You are if the pedestrian crossing signal is green and you give way to traffic on the main road.
It's a fairly standard left filter lane including a pedestrian crossing.

[jnty]

I've witnessed a couple of overruns here presumably caused by mistaking the second set of lights as secondaries for the first set.

Two sets of lights in quick succession, or one set in combination with an unsignalled priority junction (eg. a left turn slip with a pedestrian crossing or give way, or on exit from a roundabout) is an unusual but not uncommon setup, and one that is quite handy in many situations. It's therefore maybe a bit odd that we don't have any standard signage or road marking to indicate where this is happening - you have to just sort of take it in from the stop lines (which you easily might not see until it's 'too late' if you're behind someone) and positioning of the lights, at a time when you're probably processing a lot of other information from a presumably quite busy and complex road environment.

I wonder if a conspicuously different standard backing board for a second set of lights would be useful, combined perhaps with some sort of extra lining in advance, a bit like the yellow rumble strips used on approach to roundabouts off high speed roads? As well as making existing installations safer, this could maybe increase the number of locations layouts like this could be used, incorporating places where the standard approach would previously have been considered unsafe.

[JohnnyMo]

Have a quick look at this junction, are you clear to turn left ?

I see three green balls, think I'm clear to go straight on and right too.

Bit facetious but certainly not hard to imagine making that mistake going straight on if there was a lorry waiting to turn right and the left hand red light was out/obscured/knocked round.

Exactly you missed the point, the green lights are a pelican crossing not traffic lights. There is a Give-Way at the end of the end of the slip lane but image a dark raining evening with pedestrians waiting to cross it is easy to miss.

[KeithW]

Exactly you missed the point, the green lights are a pelican crossing not traffic lights. There is a Give-Way at the end of the end of the slip lane but image a dark raining evening with pedestrians waiting to cross it is easy to miss.

Which is ludicrous, the proper signals at a Pelican crossing are like this removing any scope for confusion :

[FosseWay]

Regarding the OP - I saw those two videos from Ashley Neal as well.

Derek - I don't know how long you've been watching his videos for, but you need to know that his style is generally to allocate general responsibility to one party in accidents like this, and then look at what everyone else involved, including the roads authority, owners of parked vehicles and so on, also could have done. In this case I agree it's basically the cyclist's fault - he ran a red. He may not have intended to, but he did. I didn't mean to break the speed limit the other day but I did because I read the sign wrong, and I'm expecting the fine in the post. There's no-one to blame but me, although you can question why the limit is what it is just there, what else could be done to get people to slow before the camera, blablabla. Ironically, as Ashley mentions, a cyclist who jumps a red because he's misinterpreted the signals is at greater risk than one who deliberately does this, as the latter will be on the lookout for people likely to conflict. Indeed, the lack of checking is one reason why Ashley thinks the cyclist didn't do it on purpose.

I can though explain the replacement of the lightweight tram buffer stop. Buffer zone for the workmen needs greater protection than normal moving traffic.

I don't quite follow. Why do the workers need more protection than usual? Surely the tram line is closed, given that there's a blinkin' great concrete cylinder plonked across the tracks? Or is there a risk from road traffic that is greater than normal for this kind of work that I'm not seeing?

In any case, it's not acceptable to protect one group of people by increasing risk to others. The first thing I thought when I saw the first Ashley Neal video, before the car and cyclist collided, was WTAH is that great thing in the middle of the road? No-one can see anything round it. Frankly, if I as a random punter have that reaction, it should be staringly obvious to a highways professional that it's not a sensible solution, regardless of what the problem is.

[WHBM]

Old traffic engineer here.

Firstly, overall principle, the roads are As You Find Them. It is up to the road users to handle them at each point in an appropriate manner. This includes understanding what traffic signals mean. At the end of the day it is not "cars", nor "bicycles", that do the understanding of the signals, it is road users, their signals are the same, and it is up to all to understand them.

We don't know the cyclist in the first clip misinterpreted the left turn arrow for a straight ahead, they may be one of the many who blast through anyway. It is still incumbent on such a road user to look all around, I certainly do whether cycling or driving, the cyclist was in a higher head position than the car driver.

Now, there have long been road features which were capable of improvement to enable road users to understand the situation better, reduce conflict points, improve visibility, or whatever, and what engineers have done to a considerable extent has been a contributor to road deaths falling from some 7,000 per year in the mid-1970s to 1,800 nowadays. We used to say we could never get below 2,000, and then it happened. There have been multiple contributing factors to all this, separate discussion, but the road infrastructure improvements are typically once and for all items rather than needing annual refreshment, like for example vegetation in visibility splays.

[jnty]

I'm trying to understand the big cylinder tram stop thing. The tram line is still in use prior to that - the stop has shut, but it's still used as a turnback and possibly for stabling as that's where the points are. The tram project largely has a "one dig" policy, so they will have attempted to do all the work required at once especially as it would have required a very disruptive closure. This means they will have taken out the old buffers and put in two continuous tracks across the road. My theory would be that the old buffers had very significant foundations giving them a great deal of "stopping power" such that replacing them effectively with an object sitting on the ground requires that object to be extremely heavy.

I'm not entirely sure why such a stop is required when the end state is obviously going to have trams stopping and proceeding over there all the time. It might be that the track infrastructure isn't ready or hasn't been proved safe; the overhead lines might not be ready, presenting a de-wirement risk; the position of the points may force trams to stop further forward than they will when signals are in place, when a safety buffer can be provided; in-cab signalling backup safeguards may be provided once signals are in place; or it may be a requirement for permitting long term stabling of trams or leaving them unattended while the drivers change ends.

And as noted upthread, whereas previously an runaway tram would immediately derail and be slowed down, with the new layout it will be sent without resistance across a three lane road, through a pedestrian crossing waiting area, into an active worksite and, worst case, all the way down Leith Walk!

[FosseWay]

We don't know the cyclist in the first clip misinterpreted the left turn arrow for a straight ahead, they may be one of the many who blast through anyway.

We don't know for sure, no, but as I pointed out above and Ashley Neal mentions in his analysis, quite a lot in this particular case does point to it being a mistake - i.e. a lack of observation or misinterpretation of what was observed - rather than deliberate disobedience of the red light. People who run reds generally do this when they think they can make it. Quite often their risk assessment is some way off, but even in cases that result in accidents, there's clear evidence of last-minute attempts to avoid the collision. There wasn't in this case - I think the cyclist genuinely thought he had priority, and as you say, failed to check for people apparently proceeding against it.

Firstly, overall principle, the roads are As You Find Them. It is up to the road users to handle them at each point in an appropriate manner. This includes understanding what traffic signals mean. At the end of the day it is not "cars", nor "bicycles", that do the understanding of the signals, it is road users, their signals are the same, and it is up to all to understand them.

I'm afraid that that isn't a good enough response from "society" or "the authorities" or whatever you want to call the party that isn't the private individual. Yes, it is incumbent on all road users both to obey the law and to be aware of what's going on around them. But road users are human and humans make mistakes. If there's an issue with a road layout, surface, signage or whatever that either is clearly substandard or has been pointed out as being so by the fact of several recorded accidents or near-misses, and the authority responsible for it ignores those signals and does nothing about it, then that authority bears some of the responsibility for any loss or damage that results from further accidents there.

How much responsibility it's reasonable to allocate in that direction depends on what needs fixing, how problematic it is, and how realistic it is to fix it in a relevant timeframe. Whole junction layouts probably do need to be taken as found as a basic practical rule, because they can't be changed in the twinkling of an eye. But huge concrete monstrosities in the middle of the road that obscure the view for multiple road users at once can be moved (or not put there in the first place). Same with potholes, worn markings, missing signage. None of this is difficult to fix, so it is indefensible when it isn't fixed and contributes to an accident.

As individuals we have an absolute responsibility to keep our vehicles in an acceptable state of repair, such that obvious things like broken lights, bald tyres and bad brakes don't endanger us and others on the roads. We can't use the excuse of not having the money - it is a must. It's about time roads authorities took a similar responsibility for their part of ensuring road safety.