West Hollywood has completed crosswalk safety improvements along Fountain Avenue at five key intersections — part of an effort to address traffic concerns on an artery seen by residents as a neighborhood street and by others as an alternative to Sunset and Santa Monica boulevards for crosstown traffic.
The city’s efforts have included the installation of high-visibility striped crosswalks in October 2018 at Fountain’s intersections with North Harper Avenue, Havenhurst Drive, North Hayworth Avenue, North Formosa Avenue and North Detroit Street.
This month, the city added new flashing pedestrian warning lights that assist pedestrians with visibility when using crosswalks and help stop traffic along Fountain Avenue for safe crossing. New lighting is installed on the edges of yellow, diamond-shaped pedestrian warning signs. Bright lights facing traffic lanes have been embedded in the roadway, forming a visual line along the perimeter of each crosswalk. Lighting is activated by push buttons located at poles along the curbside step-off points for each crosswalk and flashes rapidly during the duration of pedestrian crossing.
The crosswalks feature small refuge islands in the center of the roadway in order to reduce the exposure of pedestrians crossing and to increase motorist awareness of pedestrians crossing. The islands are marked with bright yellow paddle signs, which face lanes of traffic.
Additional safety treatments include bulb-outs at intersection corners to reduce crossing distances and enhance pedestrian safety, as well as selected right-turn-only signs in order to reduce potential conflict points. In addition, trailer-mounted electronic signs have been placed at key locations within the city to encourage drivers to slow down and abide by posted speed limits. Speed radar feedback signs have also been installed near Sweetzer Avenue, Fairfax Avenue, Gardner Street and Detroit Street. The city will evaluate these new improvements to determine their effectiveness in reducing vehicle speeds and accident rates. Pending the results of the testing phase, the striped bulb-outs and refuge islands may be replaced with permanent concrete fixtures.
This crosswalk improvement effort is part of the effort to explore a mix of measures to address safety in a densely populated city where the mix of dense vehicular traffic and pedestrians in close proximity is an ongoing challenge. These enhanced crosswalks join a variety of improvements as part of a comprehensive plan developed by the city to improve pedestrian safety that focuses on engineering, enforcement and education.
In February 2019, the city’s contracted Parking Enforcement personnel began monitoring major intersections during commute hours and are issuing citations to drivers who block intersections or crosswalk areas. The aim is to help ease bottlenecks at intersections during rush-hour traffic and to increase pedestrian and bicyclist safety.
The city also installed several new signalized pedestrian crosswalks along Santa Monica Boulevard and has installed solar-powered radar speed indicator signs along major corridors in order to remind drivers to drive within the speed limit. Striping improvements were also made at the Fountain and La Brea Avenue intersection to improve traffic circulation and increase the length of the left turn pocket in the eastbound direction in order to accommodate more vehicles.
The cross traffic blockade at Harper is encouraging those traveling south on Harper to turn right on Fountain and do U-turns to then proceed east.
When the lights at Fairfax, Laurel and Crescent Heights are green, Fountain westbound becomes a 60mph autobahn because there are is NO law enforcement in sight. Handing out a few weeks worth of tickets for speeding and the U-turns would have an impact.
The “improvements” at Hayworth and Fountain are NOT finished. Drivers do not obey the right only sign. They drive across the intersection and into the intersection to turn left. They will be finished when drivers cannot cross Fountain, and cannot turn left.
I blame Bette Davis.
Fountain Ave. is a highway
Yes “the installation of high-visibility striped crosswalks” is a good step in the right direction and including yellow diamond shaped pedestrians crossing signs with flashing LEDs. Better yet would be flashing LEDs embedded at the edge of the crosswalks. The root of the problem that needs to addressed is, the idea that the traffic convenience whims of drivers of fancy status mobiles take precedent over the lives pedestrians! An example of this can clearly be seen every-time we have a pedestrian traffic fatality and, all the public media are quick to engage in victim blaming when it comes to the… Read more »
I live near the Fountain / Harper intersection and though I appreciate the crosswalks a d flashing pedestrian lights – the blockage of of the intersection to north/south traffic is terrible for residents on the street, in addition to being trashy looking. “To prevent accidents” is why they’re up. But the accidents happen because of speeding down fountain, and not because of cross traffic. Solve the speeding, don’t create impediment to the people who live at this intersection to returning to our own homes.
These are great additions to the street and I have found them very comforting(?) when crossing Fountain as a pedestrian. The button-activated flashing ped lights embedded in the road should be in as many places as possible – they WORK.
Now let’s extend the no parking times on Fountain from La Cienega to Faifax from
7 – 9:30am and 3:30 – 7:30pm.
One thing West Hollywood has failed to do for the last five years after numerous requests to members of the city council and the city manager is putting a northbound/southbound left turn sign at Crescent Heights and Fountain which grew out of the 8150 Sunset Blvd project bordering West Hollywood. WEHO failed to do a traffic study related to the 8150 Sunset Blvd development. This should have been done since construction will cause major problems on Sunset heading east toward the busy Crescent Heights/Laurel/Sunset intersection along with Havenhurst Drive which is adjacent to the development as Crescent Heights. This isn’t… Read more »
Sorry, Michael, but we’ve already been re-branded as the “sex-based city”.