Safer than a signal?
Neighbors near my home have complained for years about speeding traffic along Glascock Street and Brookside Drive. Finally, some opted to petition the city to implement traffic calming measures and the city agreed to act.
Part of the plan includes removing the traffic signal at Glascock and Brookside in favor of stop signs. Some neighbors in Oakwood expressed concern about this change, fearing that it would cause confusion, especially when kids are walking to school.
Well, I have kids at the local school and we either walk or ride bikes there every school day. Glascock isn’t part of our preferred path because, not only is Edmund Street more convenient for us but also too many cars speed on Glascock. Even so, I walk through the Glascock/Brookside intersection nearly every other morning and can say that even with traffic signals (and pedestrian heads) crossing there remains a dicey undertaking.
This point was made crystal-clear one morning two weeks ago. Crossing Glascock from the south with the dog, I made it to the middle of the street before I realized I was staring down at the hood of a car. A sleepy kid, apparently on his way to Enloe High School, had completely missed the walk signal and only missed me by a few inches. Fortunately he stopped before he hit me but the episode showed me that the traffic signals were of no use in keeping pedestrians safe.
Sadly, this isn’t the first time I’ve almost been run over while crossing legally at the light. Would I trust my kids to cross the street alone here? Hell, no!
Oakwood recently went through a traffic calming process itself, making almost all of its intersections four-way stops (including some that had traffic lights). I compared the Brookside traffic calming to the recent change to stop signs in Oakwood and asked how traffic in Oakwood might be affected if its stop signs were swapped with traffic lights.
Understandably, no one on the Oakwood mailing list thought this would be an improvement. Indeed, some Oakwoodians seemed quite protective of their stop signs, and that illustrates my point exactly. If Raleigh’s traffic engineers insist that replacing the traffic signal with stop signs will make things safer (and they have the studies to prove it, which I understand they do), then I’m willing to entertain their suggestion.
sounds like a good time to start implementing traffic circles and speed humps!
This particular intersection won’t fit a traffic circle as some of the homes are too close to the road, but there is one proposed for the other end of the road – at a particularly poorly-designed intersection (Wake Forest Road-Brookside-Automotive Way). The neighborhood can’t wait for that one to be built!