MORGANTOWN — At intersections with no painted crosswalk lines or traffic-control devices, pedestrians still have the right-of-way in West Virginia.
Sounds good, in theory.
“I think one day 64 cars passed us. We’re standing there a half-mile from school, a little kid waving at the school buses, and the cars just go by,” Vaike Haas told Morgantown City Council during its most-recent regular meeting.
The routinely terrible experience of trying to walk her child across Collins Ferry Road to Suncrest Elementary School was still fresh in Haas’ mind when she, Tiphani Davis and Sumi Mehta were awarded grant funding for a project called Suncrest Safe Routes.
Working in conjunction with the city’s engineering department and the Morgantown Pedestrian Safety Board, and with guidance from the Morgantown Monongalia Metropolitan Planning Organization’s 2020 Morgantown Regional Bike and Pedestrian Transportation Plan, a number of key crossing locations were identified.
And the bright orange flags started going up.
“There are currently six crossing-flag installation locations, all in the Suncrest neighborhood near schools. Three are on Collins Ferry, near Suncrest Elementary; three are closer to Suncrest Middle,” Haas told The Dominion Post, noting the next location will be the intersection of Rotary Street and University Avenue.
It’s a pretty simple concept.
Instead of standing on the side of the road hoping to be noticed, would-be crossers grab a flag from a metal receptacle and start waving. Once traffic stops or clears, the flag is carried across the street and deposited in the receptacle on the other side.
“I don’t think drivers are being rude on purpose. I think they just didn’t see people. They just weren’t on the lookout. There’s no crosswalk. There’s nothing that says, ‘look for people here.’” Haas said. “By marking those intersections where you usually look for them, you see the orange [flags] even when there’s no people, so then you start to keep an eye out.”
Haas, an associate professor of landscape architecture at WVU, made the flags herself.
And according to her observations, they appear to be working. She said the driver yield rate has increased from 1.6% to 36.6% when pedestrians use the flags.
That’s the kind of data that Haas and others would like to present to the West Virginia Department of Highways in support of pedestrian improvements, like crosswalks.
“The whole point of this is to demonstrate to the regional engineer that if you make changes drivers will change behavior. This is why crosswalks get denied because he doesn’t want to make a false sense of security in front of the school — the elementary school where traffic is 2,000-ish vehicles per day,” Haas said. “If we can show that making changes works, I think we can advocate for more change.”
The Dominion Post reached out to the DOH to ask about the implementation of the program along state routes, like Collins Ferry Road and University Avenue, but didn’t receive a response in time for this report.
The flags portion of the project was funded by a $10,000 federal grant through the U.S. State Department’s Alumni TIES (Thematic International Exchange Seminars) small grant program.
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