Crosswalks / Zebra Crossings

What is this guy standing on?

The road?  Yes, but more specifically the crosswalk, the zebra crossing, the series of white lines that should give all vehicles pause.  (actually he's standing next to it)

What is it for? 

People walk across it.  Don't park your car on it.  Don't ride your bike across it (dismount and push).  It's for pedestrians. 

Zebra crossings are iconic.  Everyone knows immediately what they are.  Even heavily modified, it is obvious what they are.

This is a zebra crossing in Lisbon made with the names of pedestrians killed while crossing the street.

I would argue that the zebra crossing is the most common subspecies of the standard crosswalk.  This for example is a crosswalk, but not a zebra crossing.


Indy Cultural Trail

 St. Louis has a few alternate crosswalks of the patterned variety.  The temporary improvements to Memorial Drive in front of Luther Ely Smith Square are a good example.  Red lines distinguish the pedestrian realm from the rest of the road.

Richmond Heights has also tried out this idea with its New Urbanist project around the Crate & Barrel next to the MetroLink. 

The rest of St. Louis however is dominated by a strange and cheap alternate kind of crosswalk.

taken from the STL Rising blog

The standard St. Louis crosswalk consists of just two parallel white lines.  At least most of the time.  Sometimes there's just one while line, which is a bit confusing.  Usually there's a car parked on it waiting for the light to change.


South Grand might change one day, but will the crosswalks?



Arsenal and Morgan Ford is a particularly confusing intersection for anyone hoping to cross the street on foot.

 Even a heavily trafficed intersection, like Delmar and Skinker, is not particularly well marked.

When I returned to the US last month, I was surprised to see that the standard zebra crossing I had been crossing daily for the past few years abroad was missing altogether from my hometown.  I'm from St. Louis but somehow managed to forget that it lacks distinctive crosswalks.  In fact, I have discovered the crosswalks that do exist are a nightmare to use.

Steve Patterson at Urban Review STL put some pictures on his blog a while back that people should pay attention to.  Steve is part of the committee in charge of the Gateway Mall, but even he can't get rid of the plastic toilets blocking the sidewalk in CityGarden or address the major flaws with the design of the new corners,

a very rare kind of stl crosswalk

Since Steve's original post on it, I've returned to St. Louis to see for myself that virtually every ADA compliant sidewalk in the city looks a little like this,

taken from the Urban Review STL blog

 
Everywhere I go, I see new curbs that barely line up with the crosswalks they're intended for, and virtually all of them hold water.

I tell myself that St. Louis is a poor city with very little money for public works.  There's little public money for paying decent designers, and there's little money for painting proper crosswalks.  Yet, it absolutely must be fixed. 

On South Lindbergh, I saw a man in a powered wheel chair trying to navigate a driveway that broke the sidewalk.  He jumped his chair off the curb for lack of a better option, and it wasn't pretty.  He then proceeded to power his chair into a lane of traffic due to his inability to get back on the next curb. 

I've seen streets like this elsewhere.  Siam Reap, Surabaya, Ho Chi Min City, Manila... and other places that St. Louis would probably not like to be compared with.  Although... they had zebra crossings not unmarked pavement, so maybe it isn't a fair comparison for the 3rd world either.