A number of e-mails have been posted on a variety of topics that started with concern about the recent crash at Cottage Grove Road and Dempsey involving a bicyclist towing a trailer and motorist.
The intersection of Cottage Grove Road and Dempsey has traffic signals. This is a full intersection, the bike route is on-street at this point. This bike route is not just a part of a popular recreational route around Lake Monona, it is an important transportation route, as are all bike routes in Madison. I am not aware of a bicyclist fatality at Dempsey and Cottage Grove Road in the past. Going back to 2002, not including the recent crash, I see 4 crashes involving bicyclists and one crash involving a pedestrian at this intersection. My understanding of the crash that occurred the other day is that it involved a bicyclist towing a trailer with two kids in the trailer. The bicyclist was northbound on Dempsey crossing Cottage Grove Road in the west crosswalk with the walk signal. The motorist was also northbound on Dempsey making a westbound left turn from Dempsey onto Cottage Grove Road with the green signal. This is a common pedestrian crash type. A motorist making a left turn is looking ahead and to the right (if no signal) for a gap in traffic. When the driver sees a gap they tend to start to turn but forget to check the crosswalk to the left (ahead and behind them) for pedestrians first. This is one of the scenarios illustrated in the video Wisconsin Traffic Law: Pedestrian Safety on the City’s website at http://www.cityofmadison.com/trafficEngineering/bicyclingPed.cfm Here is the direct link to the video http://www.cityofmadison.com/mcc12/archive/transportation/fleet.ram The video is about 11 minutes long. Where a shared use path crosses a street the City typically - - posts a street name sign to indicate the intersection and provide location information to both path users and cross street users - - marks a ladder style (zebra or continental) crosswalk - - installs path ahead warning signs on the cross street in advance of the path intersection (this is the yellow diamond shaped sign with a graphic of a bicyclist on it. Note that a new sign with a graphic of both a bicyclist and a pedestrian recently was installed on Dickinson at the Capital City Path. This is a newly available sign that we are starting to use). - - Sometimes we have a path crossing sign at the path/street intersection. This is the same sign as above, but instead of being located a distance in advance of the path intersection it is located at the intersection with a supplemental sign below it with an arrow pointing down to the crossing. We do not officially call them “bike paths” anymore. They are “shared use paths”. Older path name signs say BIKE PATH but newer ones simply say PATH. We receive a lot of complaints from pedestrians about rude bicyclists (similar to the complaints we receive from bicyclists about rude drivers) including bicyclists telling pedestrians it’s a “bike path” and the pedestrians should either not be there or should get out of the bicyclist’s way. Please be courteous to pedestrians and share the path. The robust zebra or continental style crosswalk markings we use at these crossings are to signal to drivers their responsibility to yield to pedestrians at these intersections and to draw drivers’ attention to the path intersection. Unfortunately, I recall having seen a study a long time ago where they stopped drivers on the street and asked them to recall the last several traffic signs they passed. The result was that about half the people could not do this. In terms of having pedestrian signals at signalized path/street crossings, it depends on how much time during the signal cycles you want to give to allow different users to cross the street. Wisconsin law states that on a bikeway adjacent to a street, which would be the situation with the Capital City Path alongside John Nolen Drive at Rimrock, the bicyclist on the path follows the traffic signs and signals for the parallel adjacent street [WI Law 346.803(1)(b)]. A pedestrian at a signalized intersection without pedestrian signals can legally begin to cross anytime on the green, and can cross against the red if they yield to traffic first [WI Law 346.37(1)(a)2 and 346.47(1)(c)2]. Note that if a pedestrian starts near the end of the green and the signal turns red while the pedestrian is still in the crosswalk, the driver on the cross street, when their signal turns green, still has to yield and let the pedestrian finish crossing the street safely. A green signal does necessarily mean go. When the signal turns green the driver first needs to “. . . yield the right−of−way to other vehicles and to pedestrians lawfully within the intersection or an adjacent crosswalk at the time such signal is exhibited.” [WI Law 346.37(1)(a)1] When we add the pedestrian signal to the equation, what we effectively do is reduce the time when a pedestrian can legally start to cross the street to the time when the white WALK or walking person signal is displayed. Pedestrians now can only start to cross on the WALK, they cannot start to cross when the flashing or steady DONT WALK /red person symbol is showing. [WI Law 346.38]. At a path crossing such as at John Nolen/Rimrock, if we added pedestrian signals, would the bicyclist need to follow the pedestrian signals, or the red-yellow-green traffic for the adjacent parallel street )John Nolen Dr. in the example)? Motorist would probably think the former but bicyclists the latter. The Wisconsin State Statutes on Rules of the Road, Chapter 346, are at http://www.legis.state.wi.us/statutes/Stat0346.pdf Arthur Ross, Pedestrian-Bicycle Coordinator City of Madison Traffic Engineering Division 215 Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd., Suite 100 PO Box 2986 Madison, WI 53701-2986 608/266-6225
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