Metronauts
Exploring a sustainable urban future
A new form of transit priority
Posted on October 5, 2008 at 12:37 pm by Shawn Smith
I love this video. It shows a new form of restricted access to Manchester’s pedestrian city centre. A sensor on the bus tells the bollard to lower like a sophisticated automated gate. Aggressive drivers try to beat the system… and fail miserably.
I’ve seen similar bollards in Madrid, Spain. I doubt that we will see something like this installed in North America anytime soon. It is a bold move, and puts transit and pedestrians at the top of the transportation hierarchy. However, we are starting to see a culture shift by City of Toronto staff away from car-first planning. Their official plan states that pedestrians, cyclists, and transit must be given more priority than cars on city streets. Narrowing streets, wider sidewalks, bike lanes, scramble intersections are a few of the changes we are starting to see implemented. Hopefully there’s more of this to come.
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I’ve seen this video around back when a automobile drove onto the Fleet Street ROW from Bathurst and hit the streetcar. Wonder if they still do?
Maybe we should start to use the international keep right sign which is a white arrow pointing down to the curb on a blue background.
This is the answer for King!
Not sure how it would work in our climate.
I’d have more sympathy for these people, especially in the second incident, if they weren’t obviously speeding up in an attempt to get over the rising posts. If they were just cluelessly following the bus and getting snagged, they would be lost, not consciously reckless.
They also wouldn’t be hurting themselves as much, because they wouldn’t be accelerating toward the rising posts and launching themselves into the air like the Dukes of Hazzard. “Hang on, kids!”