by Marie Moeller ’15
Journalism Student

I learned: If crosswalks could talk, they would be seriously annoying

Annoying indeed. It was about a week ago that I went to Gordon Biersch (a really good restaurant) with my family. It’s located right on the edge of an intersection, so from where we parked, my family and I had to cross the intersection to get to the restaurant.

However, my brother and I noticed something rather peculiar about these crosswalks. Well, not the crosswalks in particular—they fashioned their normal zebra striped paint—but the pedestrian crossing signal posts were a bit on the weird side. You know what I am talking about right? The big lamp posts that say whether or not to walk across? And sometimes you can press a button to make the light change faster so you don’t have wait? I’m hoping you got it because I’m even starting to confuse myself (which can happen really easily). So, anyways, my brother and I noticed that upon the press of the button a loud, deep male voice rings out: WAIT!

Well, excuse me monsieur, but I am hungry and I will not wait to get my dinner. Honestly? I thought the buttons were to make the light change colors not to tell me to wait. No matter how mad I was at the invisible man trapped inside the button, my 5-year-old instincts took over, so, naturally, I had to press the button like 100 more times. Wait. Wait. Wait … Wait! It was actually pretty amusing.

I noticed, though, as we finally got to crossing the street, that there was also a really annoying beeping noise that occurred when you were allowed to cross the street. Now, although I’m not a rocket scientist or anything, I managed to figure out that the sounds are used for the visually impaired. It might be just me, but to me a beeping noise doesn’t mean walk in my mind. So, I decided to do a little research.

I went to a couple different websites (but most of my information is from http://www.accessforblind.org/aps_abt.html) and learned about Accessible Pedestrian Signals (APS). APS is “a device that communicates information about pedestrian timing in nonvisual format such as audible tones, verbal messages, and/or vibrating surfaces.” Well, what I heard definitely fit the definition of that, but I was still a little confused on how the visually impaired are able to use the exasperating (that’s a funny word) sounds advantageously. As I continued to read, I learned of how these buttons—like the one I stated earlier—are used to point a pedestrian in the right direction and make audible tones or verbal messages to inform the pedestrian when to walk.

However, if the noise being made sounds like my alarm clock and you can hear it a mile away, there has to be something wrong because I am pretty sure that wasn’t the intended purpose. Plus, it wouldn’t just be confusing on which part of the intersection can walk if audio is so loud? The website even argued, “However, surveys of pedestrians who are blind and recent research indicate that this type of beaconing does not help and may prevent pedestrians who are blind from hearing vehicles and other important information.” I mean, can’t they just make an audible count down that can only be heard within range of the two pedestrian crossing signals? I think that would be a better solution. At least to me, bothersome sounds aren’t helping me or the blind. But, hey, points for effort, right?