Being a pedestrian city, DC has its share of pedestrian accidents, with about 3,000 hit a year. The city has been trying to make sure it’s safe to walk, in part by installing 1,300 pedestrian countdown signals and starting a pedestrian safety program. However, some of those countdown signals seem to be malfunctioning. A few months ago, I was walking at 16th and U when the countdown signal seemed to skip from about 15 to 0, meaning I was in the middle of the road at zero and had to hurry across. I figured I just misread the signal the first time I looked and forgot about it. Then I noticed the phenomenon another time on Columbia near 16th, and last week saw it a few more times along Massachusetts Avenue near the Convention Center.

Convinced I wasn’t crazy, and worried that this could be dangerous and possibly widespread, I contacted the DC Department of Transportation for an explanation — is it an error, or maybe done on purpose to keep traffic moving faster? George Branyan, DDOT’s Pedestrian Program Coordinator, said in an email that he wasn’t aware of problems like I described and that it was definitely not on purpose, adding that DDOT technicians would look into it the problems. He also wrote that signals which have a “push to walk” button and detect cars, of which there are about 30 in the city, occasionally do malfunction and restart once they get to zero, but that this wasn’t the issue at the intersections I mentioned. Branyan recommended that anyone who notices a similar problem call it into the Mayor’s Call Center at 202-727-1000. Has anybody else noticed this happening? Maybe you’re not going crazy after all.

Photo by Swaneeswan