When the city finally upgraded the old skinny paint-only door zone bike lane on 2nd Ave in 2014, it was an incredible increase in biking comfort downtown. But almost immediately after opening one thing became clear: The array of signals hanging on just one street post was confusing people.

Most of downtown Seattle has traffic signals on the sides, not hanging over the center of the street. When the only information you need to convey is start or stop, this isn’t such a big deal. But when the new bike lane and left turn signals joined the walk and through-traffic signals, the post simply got overloaded with info. There could be a walk signal, a green bike, a red left arrow, a “No Turn on Red” sign and a green circle (later changed to an up arrow) all grouped next to each other.

The result was some people in cars turning left across the bike lane when bikes had the green and some people on bikes going through a red because they were looking at the green up arrow. Most people followed the signals correctly, but “most” just isn’t good enough when such serious safety issues are concerned.

So as part of the city’s regular signal maintenance program, SDOT has started replacing the old signals with a more modern style spanning 2nd Ave. This way each lane gets its own signal, making it abundantly clear who should go and who should wait.

“We are focusing on 2nd Avenue because it’s the one over time that’s been having problems,” said Seattle Traffic Engineer Dongho Chang. “We would like to do all of them all the way [from University] down to Cherry.” (more…)