Crosswalk idea for Westmorland Road

I was in east Saint John today and drove along the section of Westmorland Road that runs between the McAllister Place Mall and the power center anchored by Walmart.

 

This is an area that has a relatively long stretch without a cross walk.

It is also an area with lots of pedestrians and jaywalkers. In part, this is because there is a bus stop at the mall that gets folks close to Walmart, as the crow flies but not as traffic markings allow.

I’ve posted about this issue before.

There may be a desire to accommodate needs of pedestrians and drivers in solving this. When I visited the UK I saw a crosswalk solution that might be useful for such a wide street. I have sketched the idea below. Not being an urban planner, I’m not aware of the name of this type of crossing.

Creating a pedestrian activated crossing that allowed for a pedestrian to cross all the lanes would require traffic to be stopped for a long time. This may be shunned by a city of drivers.

While my sketch puts the crossing in an arbitrary place, the idea is to have pedestrians cross to an island in the centre of the street (which would be protected by barricades or fencing) and then to activate another light that would allow them to cross the remaining lanes of traffic that go in the opposite direction.  This way, the time that each direction of traffic is disrupted is limited and pedestrians will have a safer way to get across the street than their current jaywalking strategy.

(Aerial photography is from http://geonb.snb.ca/geonb/)