End the beg button at crosswalks
Encourage walking (and cycling) by adopting automatic walk signals at crosswalks
In Gainesville, as in a lot of other places, in order to trigger a walk signal at a crosswalk, you have to hit a button and hope for the best. Sometimes, if you hit the button after a green light, you have to wait until the next cycle for that walk signal. Sometimes, if you don’t hit the button at all and there’s no car waiting, the green light won’t trigger. Sometimes, if you are on a bike and waiting at an intersection and you don’t awkwardly maneuver yourself over to the crosswalk to hit the beg button, you will not get a green light until a car pulls up behind you to trigger the light cycle.
This sucks. It’s a stupid relic of car culture that persists in a lot of places. In Gainesville, for some reason, you can find this reliance on the beg button to trigger walk cycles in downtown, where people actually walk a lot! Most frustratingly, you find it on so-called bike boulevards like NE 2nd Ave. I can tell you from experience that having to stop at an intersection and then ride up on the sidewalk to press a stupid button to trigger a light cycle that otherwise wouldn’t happen is infuriating.
You know what would be a lot smarter? Just having the walk signal come on every time the green light comes on! You know what would be even smarter than that? Auto time triggered lights, especially in high cycling and pedestrian areas like downtown and campus! Meaning, instead of waiting for a car or a person pushing a stupid button to trigger a light cycle, it just happens every so often (30 seconds, 45 seconds, a minute? it should be adjusted based on context of the street/neighborhood).
If communities want more people to walk, and they absolutely should for health and environmental reasons, then they have to lower the barriers to walking. When they design for cars and cars-only, they will continue to get more and more car traffic. But if they start designing infrastructure for pedestrians and cyclists, they’ll start to see more bikes and pedestrians. Walking and riding in car-centric infrastructure isn’t just annoying, it’s dangerous, as has sadly been proven time and time again.
Even drivers should support this, though it may slow some speeds down just a touch or cause more red lights. More people riding and walking means less people driving which means less traffic which leads to a more pleasant driving experience.
Ending the beg button at crosswalks and installing automatic light triggers are two small ways to tweak our existing overly car-centric infrastructure to make things just a little bit more inviting for pedestrians and cyclists (and scooter riders).