Pedestrian Infrastructure

Pre-Holiday Crowdsourcing Project: Map NYC’s Busted Crosswalk Displays

We've got a nice piece of interactive reporting you might want to contribute to on your trip home tonight or while you're making some holiday shopping rounds. Alex Goldmark at Transportation Nation is collecting photos and locations of NYC's crosswalk signals gone haywire -- the ones that show both the "Walk" and "Don't Walk" symbols during the walk phase.

By Ben Fried

4:19 PM EST on December 21, 2010

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We’ve got a nice piece of interactive reporting you might want to contribute to on your trip home tonight or while you’re making some holiday shopping rounds. Alex Goldmark at Transportation Nation is collecting photos and locations of NYC’s crosswalk signals gone haywire — the ones that show both the “Walk” and “Don’t Walk” symbols during the walk phase.

The confusing sight seems to be getting increasingly common on New York streets. WNYC reported earlier this week that staffers with Council Member Gale Brewer’s office counted 13 busted pedestrian signals in her district. That was a year ago, and my personal observation is that the mixed-message displays have been cropping up in greater numbers since then. But that’s just one person’s hunch. To help aggregate data about the extent of the problem, you can upload photos and locations of malfunctioning signals through the WNYC website, or email newstips [at] wnyc [dot] org.

Ben Fried

Ben Fried started as a Streetsblog reporter in 2008 and led the site as editor-in-chief from 2010 to 2018. He lives in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, with his wife.

Pedestrian Infrastructure | Street Safety

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