Vancouver will consider changing the way you cross the street

Can changing something as simple as the way we cross the street save lives in Vancouver?

A potential pilot program would test what is known as a pedestrian scramble at some major intersections in the city, with the goal of improving safety.

“Pedestrian scrambles are used all over the world already,” said Meghan Winters, a professor of health sciences at Simon Fraser University. “It’s a situation where the lights turn red so that pedestrians can travel in the direction they want to go, including diagonally. When the lights turn green, the motor vehicles go through the regular cycle that they would do at the intersection.”

This essentially creates a six-way crossing and separates the pedestrians from the vehicle traffic. Winters says it greatly improves safety at the intersection.

“There’s strong and established evidence from multiple cities across the word, places like Tokyo and Toronto, showing that it is an improved situation for pedestrians,” she told CityNews, adding road safety remains a real challenge in Vancouver.

“Although we have transport policies that look toward Vision Zero — no road-users killed or seriously injured — we are seeing about 10 pedestrians killed every year in Vancouver and 160 people seriously injured,” Winters explained.

“That includes recent deaths like the one at 1st Avenue and Woodland Drive, where a 40-year-old woman died. Road violence is a terrible situation in Vancouver and it’s time for us to take interventions.”

Winters feels pedestrian scrambles are a simple, low cost way to do that.

“They’re not technologically challenging. This is a super low-cost intervention, it’s something that could happen with a very quick turnaround with very limited cost to the city. If anything, I would say the city should really move quickly towards doing this and doing it on a much larger scale than just one pilot intersection, here or there. It’s really about signal timing and it’s the kind of thing they could actually take action on very quickly across Vancouver,” she said.

Vancouver city council will consider a motion Tuesday to have staff work on where to test pedestrian scrambles in the city, with potential intersections including Broadway and Cambie and 1st and Commercial.

A similar pilot took place in 2019, with an “all walk” crossing at the intersection of Hornby and Robson downtown, without any diagonal crossing.

The current motion suggests there is a long history of public interest in a traditional pedestrian scramble in Vancouver and it has frequently been raised as an option during planning and consultation processes.

Richmond has had a pedestrian scramble at No. 1 Road and Moncton Street in Steveston since 2011.

City archive photos show Vancouver used diagonal crossings at the intersection of Granville and Hastings in the 1940s and 1950s.