Editor:
Re: Mission mom furious after son hit by driver in crosswalk
Thanks for writing this story and highlighting this issue in Mission.
I’m not defending the driver here and I clearly don’t know what happened and I’m very sympathetic to pedestrians as I’m often one myself, but I feel the city could be doing more.
I wanted to say that I’ve never been a fan of this style of crossing for pedestrians and combined traffic lights allowing flow of vehicles at the same time.
It is all too easy as a driver to concentrate on vehicles approaching and judging whether to turn left across in front of them, and then having to combine that with looking for pedestrians and make sure they are not obscured behind one of the blind spots of the car (front pillar).
How hard would it be to change all these crossings so that a pedestrian can request to cross and this stops all traffic from moving?
Yes, it causes delays for vehicles, but with the Mission expanding and the numbers of youth crossing and vehicles increasing, this is only going to get worse.
I’m assuming Mission has a strategy for road/pedestrian safety improvements? I know both as a pedestrian that I’d feel safer and as a driver I’d be far less likely to injure someone if all traffic stopped whilst pedestrians were in harm’s way.
This might be worth a follow-up story around pedestrian safety within Mission. I know they have installed some dedicated crossings with the flashing yellow lights which are a great improvement. But I’ve only seen this on brand-new crossings. When are the existing crossings going to be updated? There are still a lot of crossings in Mission where the visibility and lighting is terrible and I often struggle to see if anyone is on the crossing or waiting until I’m very close. That’s partly because the city allows cars to be parked very close to the crossings and then odd are stacked against everyone.
In the UK and much or Europe there is a safe area before and after crossings where it is illegal to park so that drivers approaching can see the crossing clearly. In addition, these crossings need the update mentioned earlier.
Gary Trinder, Mission