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Add quest for flashing_lights #5890
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In my German-speaking area, such flashing lights are extremely rare (only 1 out of 2892 crossings in my district).
Would the two answers
I would say that this needs its own quest, as I would advocate not activating this quest in the DACH region at least. Which crosswalks do you use the flashing light for? On all or could you restrict it to only |
I find the proposed question confusing
My initial thought was: The target audience for the lights are the pedestrian. Perhaps because I rarely have seen them (in western europe). Suggestion:
|
Some traffic lights in Hamburg have flashing lights, but they are for the car drivers that turn right, to warn them that pedestrians have the walk signal at the same time. They are not for pedestrians. E.g. |
I too am worried about "💤 Not an overwhelming percentage of quests have the same answer (No spam)". When you @knkski say "These crossings are common around me in the US", do you mean they are common in your neighborhood / quarter, in your city, in your state, or in whole of U.S.A. ? Because, generally, it would be best if quest could be applied to whole world, but quests which are specific just for some country (or just for some State in case of USA) are also possible, but no finer granulation is available. So, for example, if the quest would be useful in say Portland, but spammy in rest of the Oregon, it would be problematic to include it. (as it would confuse/annoy more users than it would help). In Croatia, flashing_lights are quite rare, usually only found on busier & more complex intersections, where crossing=traffic_signals have failed to prevent repeated pedestrian injuries/deaths. And yes, as noted above, |
I tracked down exactly what they're called, Rectangular Rapid Flashing Beacons (RRFB): Broad approval was granted in 2018 to start using these by the US DOT FHA, which mentions usage in Florida. I've noticed these installed more frequently around me in Minnesota as well, particularly as more intersections are being replaced with roundabouts, or with larger construction projects in general. On to the questions:
Here's the snippet from the first link:
I don't recall having seen any that would be considered
As far as I've seen, these are used exclusively at crossings without stop signs or vehicular traffic signals. Pedestrian traffic signals, when they coexist with vehicular traffic signals, are of the sort that tell pedestrians when they are allowed to cross. RRFBs, in contrast, are put in where pedestrians always have priority whenever they want to cross, and the flashing lights are to inform traffic that they're crossing.
Sure, that sounds good. For clarity's sake, these lights are warning traffic that a pedestrian is crossing, as opposed to the lights informing pedestrians when crossing is allowed.
As noted above, I think the range here is US-wide. The OSM wiki notes them in Portland, I've seen them in Minnesota, and the approval process was based on installing them in Florida, which spans from coast to coast. Let me know if there's any more questions and I'll answer as best I can. If this quest gets added, this PDF from the US DOT FHA has an icon that might work for the app: |
Could you estimate which percentage of all1 of Minnesotan2 pedestrian crossings would have those flashing lights? 90%? 50%? 10%? 1%? Footnotes |
It's difficult for me to estimate. These aren't used on quiet residential streets, so simply querying Here's an example of one. Here's an example of what would be useful when thinking about the total fraction. That crossing has the yellow diamond pedestrian crossing sign, but does not have the flashing lights. Out of crossings that have the yellow diamond pedestrian crossing sign, I would guess that RRFBs are 10% and rising in the metro area. I'm not a city planner, but it seems like it's the new thing whenever new construction is done to add them in. You won't see these without marked crossings, so a useful filter would be "if crossing isn't marked, don't ask", "if crossing has vehicular traffic signals, don't ask", and "if crossing doesn't have tactile pavement markers, dont ask". The last one isn't actually a requirement, but I would be surprised to see one without tactile pavement markers, since these are relatively new and only put in where safety is a concern. |
Uh, probably, there is
Hmmm, and how many of all pedestrians crossings would you say have that "yellow diamond pedestrian crossing sign" ?
OK, limiting the quest to only
Huh, interesting. In my little part of the Europe, majority of
Well, anything that can reduce the unnecessary asking of the quest would help; even if it results in some false positives (i.e. not asking a quest rarely when it could've been asked, is preferred to asking the quest all the time when answer would be "no" in majority of them) |
In the UK the only crossings which have this sort of thing are zebra and parallel crossings, ie marked crossings that don't have traffic signal control. Here it's the eponymous Belisha beacons that fulfil the function: the flashing orange lights on top of the black and white stripey poles. Those are to make the crossings more visible to vehicular traffic. |
Yeah, based on a quick informal survey, roads marked The
A lot of pedestrian crossings across anything other than |
I updated the starter post with the suggestions and info from this thread. I also asked in the Slack OSM US chat whether it can be further narrowed down on which kind of roads/crossings they are most likely to be found. |
There was a bit of back-and-forth in the Slack discussion, because in the U.S. there can be multiple kinds of flashing lights at or near crosswalks:
At least under federal law (which may vary slightly from state to state), RRFBs may only be attached to one of these signs: Unfortunately, we haven’t been systematically mapping these signs using The other strict requirement is that an RRFB can’t be installed at a crosswalk controlled by a stop sign, yield sign, traffic lights, or a HAWK beacon. There is an exception for yield signs at approaches to a roundabout and at slip lanes. In other words, it can only be installed at one of the crosswalks that meets the criterion above. Accurately identifying all the eligible crosswalks will be very hard because users haven’t been answering the quest proposed in #4934. A more conservative approach might be to only enable the quest for unsignalized mid-block crosswalks to begin with: a This approach will miss the many RRFBs at crosswalks across two-way stops, but at least you can be pretty sure there’s a sign that could have an RRFB or embedded LED. So even if it happens to be a neighborhood where the authorities haven’t shelled out the $10,000 to install a single RRFB, at least any spamminess won’t come as a surprise. I don’t think it’s going to be possible to predict a percentage of mid-block crosswalks that will actually have RRFBs. It will be virtually all of them in some jurisdictions and virtually none of them in others, in part because this device was only formally introduced in 2008 under interim approval. That makes it relatively new among pedestrian safety devices. But again, nothing surprising – the presence of crosswalk markings is similarly uneven across the country. Embedded LEDs are also quite new. They can be embedded not only in the crosswalk signs above but also in stop signs and even in the crosswalk marking itself. The LEDs embedded in stop signs are also
Yes, I’ve seen that configuration plenty in Europe. That configuration never occurs in the U.S. We only use beacons in the absence of vehicular traffic signals. |
That's a lot of information, thank you for this thorough and deep research @1ec5 ! One day, @1ec5 , one day I will get you to contribute code, too!!1 - so your input isn't destined to sit around here for an unspecified amount of time waiting to be processed by someone else but is directly cast into code. StreetComplete is really far too Europe-focus and part of the reason for that is surely because ~all developers are from Europe. In the meantime, in respect to this quest proposal, could you summarize¹ what you'd think would be a reasonable element filter and wording? (Yes, it is possible in StreetComplete to look for nodes not within X meters of an intersection of certain roads) ¹ the longer a ticket becomes, the less likely it becomes that someone else is going to pick it up to work on it because there is too much to dig into. So to add a summary at the end is a good way to conclude the discussion and make the ticket actionable (again) |
Sorry for the infodump – it was too much for Slack, so I put it here. Maybe the forum would be a better place to take it next time. This is the simplest conservative criteria I can come up with for a likely crosswalk sign that might have a flashing light:
I’d appreciate a gut-check on any of these criteria. Unfortunately, I’m struggling to come up with a simpler, more reliable heuristic. Maybe it’s because asking about flashing lights is a bit premature. We’d be in a much better spot if we were already mapping the presence of signs, but I’m surprised that |
For what it's worth, I've been looking at tagging for crossings with flashing lights in Ontario and these criteria would also cover most of them there 👍 Ontario's prescribed distances from signals/stop signs are similar; they can be waived or ignored in some cases, but are probably good enough for more casual street-side surveys. |
These aren't the only kind. Traditional single-aspect flashing yellow ball lights are also (possibly even more) common in North America. Belisha beacons on zebra crossings would be an example in the UK and many former commonwealths. Parts of the US also use backlit pedestrian signs, some of which either flash permanently or flash when a pedestrian requests it. In any case, they're a pretty good crosswalk to avoid or only use as a last resort as a pedestrian from my experience. |
General
Affected tag(s) to be modified/added: flashing_lights
Question asked: Does this crossing have flashing lights to warn about pedestrians?
Checklist
Checklist for quest suggestions (see guidelines):
Ideas for implementation
Element selection:
Pedestrian marked crossings without traffic signals on busy roads (i.e. not
highway=residential
etc.)For starters only in the US or even limited further to certain states within the US.
Metadata needed:
Not sure. These crossings are common around me in the US
Proposed UI:
This is what the crossings look like near me:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0a/Bike_and_pedestrian_crossing_in_Portland%2C_Oregon.jpg
UI that asks "Does this crossing have flashing lights for pedestrians?" and presents "yes", "no", or "button" would capture ~90% of the tag values. Adding "always" and "sensor" would get up to ~99% of values, and allowing for multiselect would capture 25 uses of "button;sensor", but is probably too complex.
The UI would have to have some thought put into the "Traffic Lights" question, and maybe merged with it. The UI might present the options above when asking that, for a question like "Does this crossing have traffic lights?" with answers of "No lights at all", "Yes, pedestrians must wait for the lights", "Yes, pedestrians push a button to trigger flashing lights", "Yes, flashing pedestrian lights are always on", etc.
I looked to see if any issues existed for this and didn't find any other than #5471 mentioning it in the comments.
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