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How a Few Strips of Paint Can Save Numerous Lives

Every city hides some dark secrets, and Los Angeles makes no exception. Unlike others, though, its skeletons can't be found in some dark alley or underground, but in one of the world's most famous intersections: Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue.
Hollywood and Highland 3 photos
Photo: Screenshot from YouTube
Hollywood and Highland afterHollywood and Highland before
This junction makes constant appearances on TV all over the world during the Oscar awards, but that carpet that covers its asphalt on the occasion might as well be red for a reason: up until six months ago, this was the city's most dangerous crossroad. Well, at least as far as the pedestrians were concerned.

At first, it looks like your regular affair: two roads intersecting each other at a 90 degrees angle, four sets of traffic lights and four crosswalks. However, its notoriety with the tourists means that more often than not, this place is full of people thinking more about movie stars than traffic safety. The perfect combination: lots of people (both on foot and driving) with absent minds.

Like most junctions of this type, this one too used to function by allowing both pedestrian and vehicle traffic to take turns on each axis. That meant that cars that were turning left or right had to intersect with the people crossing, either holding up the traffic or, in a worst-case scenario, causing an accident.

Six months ago, the Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT) took the simple step of redesigning the intersection with a "scramble" crosswalk. As the name suggests, this layout allows pedestrians to cross diagonally, making it a lot easier, faster and safer for them to reach any corner of the intersection.

Cars coming from all four directions now have to wait for the pedestrians to cross before taking turns, just like before, only, this time, those going right won't have anything stopping them while those going left only need to watch out for the oncoming vehicles.

And it would appear that the initiative paid off. It's still early to tell, but this place had an average of 13 crashes per year measured from 2009 to 2013. That means a little more than one every month. In the past six months since the change took place, there was just one victimless car vs. car crash. In the first 11 months of 2015 (up until the change was introduced), there were 19 incidents reported with a total of 13 injuries.

So does that mean that LA - and possibly other American cities - are in for a complete infrastructure overhaul? Well, yes and mostly no. The system will be replicated wherever it's going to be needed over time, but two facts cannot be overlooked. One is the cost of the project, which even though seems like it should be close to nothing, was actually around $100,000. And then there's the fact that a scramble crosswalk works best in intersections where there's a heavy flux of both cars and pedestrians.

Any modification has to be carefully pondered, as it may cause congestion if not properly implemented. So while this does seem to have solved the problem for Hollywood and Highland, it is certainly not the silver bullet to completely erase any car-pedestrian interaction.

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About the author: Vlad Mitrache
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"Boy meets car, boy loves car, boy gets journalism degree and starts job writing and editing at a car magazine" - 5/5. (Vlad Mitrache if he was a movie)
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