
Town in Iceland Paints 3D Zebra Crosswalk to Slow Down Speeding Cars - kshatrea
https://www.boredpanda.com/3d-pedestrian-crossing-island/
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andrewla
This is pretty cool as a trompe l'oiel, but it's just plain dangerous to put
deceptive markings on a roadway.

The should have called the project "let's train our drivers to ignore raised
obstacles on the road".

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setr
It'll also pretty quickly become useless except to people who're experiencing
it for the first time.. and for them it'll just be a terrifying surprise

And now you'll get surprising behavior from random cars, and normal behavior
otherwise, which is probably more dangerous than whatever speeding was
occurring in the first place

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wcunning
My small midwestern town just put vertical crosswalk markers in place on the
lane lines right in front of my house. This makes life terrible because I live
on 1) a major road right off of the freeway that takes a lot of commute and
out-of-town traffic because it is 2) _the route to the goddamn hospital_. This
means that the ambulances have to do crazy things to get around the people who
have nowhere to get out of the way due to the signs, and more traffic backed
up due to people inappropriately stopping at the signs. I also watched a rear
ending at one yesterday. These signs are literally dangerous on multiple
levels.

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dsfyu404ed
>My small midwestern town just put vertical crosswalk markers in place on the
lane lines right in front of my house. This makes life terrible because I live
on 1) a major road right off of the freeway that takes a lot of commute and
out-of-town traffic because it is 2) the route to the goddamn hospital. This
means that the ambulances have to do crazy things to get around the people who
have nowhere to get out of the way due to the signs, and more traffic backed
up due to people inappropriately stopping at the signs. I also watched a rear
ending at one yesterday. These signs are literally dangerous on multiple
levels.

But now someone's desire to have slow traffic is satisfied and they are no
longer pestering the local government who is no longer pestering the highway
department. That's mission accomplished as far as they care. Making the local
transportation infrastructure not suck is not a metric they are evaluated by
so all the second order effects are irrelevant.

If you're lucky the marker will have a snow plow accident in a couple months
and it will never get replaced because everyone will realize it actually made
things worse.

Also, it's worth noting that despite the slowed traffic the situation is
probably more hazardous for pedestrians because the traffic now takes more of
their time and attention.

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wcunning
Nope, they get unbolted when we start having frosts and put back in the
spring. They also replace them periodically when they get ripped off by the
large trucks and greyhound buses that don't fit between them perfectly... I
really wish I could correlate traffic slowdown in a publishable way to provide
for wrongful death suits of the ambulance occupants' families against the
city, but I haven't figured out how to quantify it cheaply and publicly yet.

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isk517
The town where I live installed one. They cost 40% more than a regular cross
walk and are a waste of money. I had driven over the thing for about a month
before I realized that it was the '3D' crosswalk and not just a poorly painted
crosswalk.

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close04
In the video from the article it looks pretty realistic from a relatively high
vantage point (drone several meter high) but from the regular driving position
it's still pretty flat and at best confusing. Is this the case when seeing it
live?

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isk517
Pretty much. When it was brand new it looked like someone had painted over a
old cross walk with two different shades of black paint. After a few weeks it
got dirty and worn down from tires and now nobody with assume it is a 3D image
at this point.

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okapii
Uhm … this won't fool anybody with more than one eye. It might look convincing
in a photo but once you look at it on location it is gonna be instantly
obvious that this is flat paint on the ground.

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jascii
I don't think it needs to "fool" them, just confuse them enough to want to
slow down and have a second look.. In my hometown (Portland, OR), there have
been several projects that increase the perceived danger of an area in an
attempt to slow people down and increase their awareness. I don't know how
effective they are, they sure are annoying :)

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marble-drink
A better solution would probably be to revoke driving privileges of anyone
caught speeding in these areas. Make it very public that this is what will
happen. Then do it. I'm sick of irresponsible drivers. If you speed on the
railway you could go to prison and never be a driver again. Similar for
pilots.

~~~
jascii
They aren't mutually exclusive. I do however suspect that the cost of some
paint is a lot cheaper then permanently monitoring and prosecuting these
drivers. Also, for prosecution to be effective as a deterrent requires the
driver to make a rational decision about the pro's and con's of being
irresponsible, is that a reasonable expectation?

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ebg13
I want to echo this comment from close04:

> _In the video from the article it looks pretty realistic from a relatively
> high vantage point (drone several meter high) but from the regular driving
> position it 's still pretty flat and at best confusing._

The first thing I thought when the video opened with a driveover was "it looks
like they got the perspective wrong". What viewing angle is it meant for?

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microcolonel
Yeah, I think if they wanted to do this properly, they would use a projector
to get the perspective exactly right from the actual vantage of the typical
driver, including cancelling out the curvature of the road for the blocks (but
not the shadow).

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alanpage
This is a cool optical illusion, but it's deceptive at best to actual drivers.
I could see it causing rear-end collisions when drivers first encounter them.

And what about cars coming from the opposite direction? They'll see something
that they won't recognize at all as a crosswalk, raised or not.

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svieira
One interesting thing is that the video at the end of the article shows a car
speeding past it (coming quite close t a child) and then slowing down at the
next (ordinarily painted) crosswalk.

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pcunite
It looked like the video was speed up at that moment, not sure why.

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dpflan
This is clever, but does it work? The car in the video at the 1 minute mark
doesn't seem to care for them.

>
> [https://i.rmbl.ws/s8/2/a/m/1/y/am1ya.caa.1.mp4?b=0&u=8khr](https://i.rmbl.ws/s8/2/a/m/1/y/am1ya.caa.1.mp4?b=0&u=8khr)

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lolsal
I am colorblind. A rely on consistency a _lot_ when I am out and about. This
sort of thing feels really deceptive. Aren't there other signs, signals or
actual three-dimensional tools that can be used to slow traffic (speed bumps)
that are not deceptive?

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jakobegger
The easiest way to slow traffic is to make the road narrower. If the sidewalk
"bulged" into the road near the crossing it would probably help a lot.

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amflare
I don't know if encouraging pedestrians to step into the way of a vehicle is
the wisest decision. If a car doesn't slow down, it will infringe on the
sidewalk. At least right now, a car under control can travel in a straight
line and be reasonably assured that their path will be free of people.

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microcolonel
The perspective is wrong I think, unless this is a one-way road.

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cookieswumchorr
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