Crossing the Road

Crossing the road in Vancouver will always be a little hazardous. You keep looking the wrong way. You're an Australian. That's your fault.

Other than that, crossing the road is really quite safe. I put it down to the lack of consistent road intersections that means that a driver absolutely cannot trust anyone around them. I'll start with the pedestrian system first.

Pedestrian lights follow the same pattern as the traffic lights and are completely automatic. Except when they're not. In which case, the button for activating the pedestrian lights will be one of six different designs. Some designs are vandal-proof - others are evidently not. Similarly, pedestrian crossings are silent (no beeping noises like in Australia). Except, of course, for those few which have had an extra "tweeter" speaker bolted to a post nearby. The direction this speaker points entirely depends on the person who attached it, and the number of people who have since changed its direction. It could point across the road to "call" pedestrians over. Or it could point straight down at you to make you move. Or it could point upwards where it remains as effective as it always was because noone trusts them because they're so unusual.

For the driver, things are also inconsistent. Most large intersections have lights on both streets. Except those that have it on just one street. In which case, the cars in the off street must just wait for a red signal on the main street (which they can't see) and then drive out. This takes a certain degree of alertness, as you have to determine if a car is stopping for a wayward pedestrian, or if the red light has really activated. Note that it is also common to have pedestrian crossings on just one street of an intersection - you are left to nimbly cross the other street yourself.

Green left-turn lights (equivalent to right-turn arrows in Australia) are not very common, even at major intersections. And note that I said lights not arrows - they are virtually indistinguishable from a second set of regular lights. At nighttime it can be quite difficult to tell if you have explicit go-ahead to turn left, or not.

All cars can turn right on any colour. Remember that most pedestrian crossing are precisely synchronised to the traffic - when a pedestrian can go, so can a car. This results in cars turning right whenever they can, getting halfway across the pedestrian crossing and then realising there really are pedestrians. As a driver never really gets explicit green to turn right, and might find pedestrians crossing at any time, they have to be really alert.

All this gives us the end result of it being quite safe to cross the road because noone ever really gets told what's going on. Quite nice really.

P.S. The fact that the pedestrian lights are synchronised to the traffic lights has the nice advantage that you have a 50% chance of your pedestrian light being green when you reach it, and a 100% chance if you wanted to go diagonally across the intersection. Makes it much more pedestrian friendly than Australia.