“Another sort of pedestrian crossing is the puffin crossing. Puffin is an interesting word. It helps you to understand what the crossing is all about. So, this is puffin.
Pedestrian, user-friendly, intelligent. What this means in practice is that the crossing will stay green for the pedestrians, therefore red for the traffic as long as there are people walking or moving across the crossing.
So, if it’s a busy location like a football stadium, the shops, lesirue centre, school or whatever, you’ll find you’re waiting there for a longer period at busy times.
But, of course, in other times when its quiet, so there’s maybe just somebody dashes across then you will get the green light for you as a car driver, you’ll get the green light a bit more quickly than on other corssings. So it’s there to help vulnerable users, to help pedestrians and sometimes cyclists get across the road. So, let’s see how it works.
The first thing to appreciate is that you’ve spotted this from quite some distance, The first clue is there.
You see some traffic lights at the moment from some distance across, you might not appreciate it’s a pedestrian crossing.
It might be a junctions crossing and you don’t know whether it’s a puffin crossing or a pelican or whatever. But, from quite some distance away, you have several seconds before you arrive at the crossing.
So, in a busy time, let’s say we’re approaching on red. So you must stop. It didn’t happen suddenly. It didn’t suddenly appear. It’s been there in front of you for several seconds before you’ve arrived and it’s red. So, we stopped. So, we’re watching pedestrians cross the road. That’ll happen for as long as there are pedestrians crossing the road. A few seconds if there’s not very many, couple of minutes or so if there a lot.
While you’re sitting there, look to the left and right and around you to see where the pedestrians are coming from.
How many more pedestrians? When is it likely that the lights are going to change? Eventually, you will get a clear space in front of you because the pedestrians have now moved off and they’re all finished crossing the road and the lights change from red to red and amber. Red and amber means get ready to go because there’s a green coming shortly. Red and amber does not mean go. It means get ready
So, how do you get ready to move off?
You need to check that it’s safe. Are there any other pedestrians still dashing from the left or right to cross the road? Are there any cyclists approahing? Have a look in your mirrors as well to see if there any cyclists coming on the near side of your car or the off side of your car. That might not impact on whether and how quickly and when you’re going to pull away.
But okay, we’ve got the green. You’ve checked. You’ve checked that it’s safe. You can now proceed but only if you’ve got somewhere to go. In busy traffic, you might find that there is a queue of traffic ahead of you and actually there’s nowhere for you to go. You cannot go just into the space where the pedestrians would cross and then sit there waiting for the traffic queue to go because there’s a traffic queue in the way and you cannot be stuck there in the middle of the crossing.
Treat it like a yellow box junction. Do not go into it unless you can get out of it. You do not want to be stuck on a zebra crossing in your car as the lights then change to red again and pedestrians are very angry at you for sitting on the middle of the crossing. So lete’s just take that one into touch. We’ll not do that.
So, we’ve got a green. We’ve checked. We’re moving off. As we’re approaching another puffin crossing, we’ll notice that there is a green light. That looks good. But we are still checking around for cyclists who might be in the area. What happens next? There’s an amber light. Now that amber light, just like a red light, that means stop. So check your mirrors. You need to be stopping adn you need to then pull up. By the time you’re doing this, it will have changed to red anyway. Okay? So, you’re now havingg to stop and you go through the cycle again.
What you’ll also ntoice is that there are zigzag lines at either side of the crossing to help pedestrians see up and down the road to make sure it’s clear for them when to cross and to make sure that you can see the pedestrians because we don’t have parked cars all over the place. So that’s puffin crossings; pedestrian, user friendly, intelligent.”
