A solid red light means stop, and pedestrians get the standard signal to cross the road. This is the only unambiguous phase of the entire cycle. But after several seconds, the solid red turns into an alternating red light, like a school bus or railroad crossing. In both of these cases, you really, really need to stop, and for good reason, because kids or a train will be crossing the street. But on a Pedestrian Hybrid Beacon, alternating red lights mean stop, make sure nobody’s crossing the street, and then keep going. This same behavior would get you a hefty fine with a school bus, and pretty much obliterated on train tracks. The proper red light behavior for “stop, look, proceed if clear” is a flashing, not alternating, red light. They were so close to getting it right, but then they took a wrong turn and used the wrong signal.
Not that it matters much. The UMass Amherst survey revealed that 65% of drivers blew through the alternating red lights without stopping, regardless of whether pedestrians were there or not. Perhaps they’ve given up on figuring out what these confusing signals are trying to tell them and decided to just go. Even worse, this phase is near the end of the pedestrian crossing cycle, where the last few people may be rushing to get across before their light turns red and traffic starts flowing again. So instead of keeping pedestrians safe, this creates a situation where people are running into the crosswalk while traffic runs the alternating red light, with a potentially disastrous outcome.
The Pedestrian Hybrid Beacon could be simplified to fix many of its flaws. If we still accept that driving through a dark signal is acceptable, we could remove the confusing flashing yellow part of the cycle, leading directly to the normal behavior of a solid yellow, followed by a solid red light that means stop, as we expect. We could either change the alternating red lights to flashing red lights to accurately communicate the “stop, look, go” behavior they’re trying to convey, or skip this phase entirely and leave the solid red on for as long as it takes pedestrians to cross, turning off only when their crossing signal has expired.
Or, we could just replace the Pedestrian Hybrid Beacon with a standard red, yellow, and green traffic light. It already conveys the behaviors we want, and by the time we’ve fixed the problems with the new signal, we’re just a green light away from this anyway.
