HALIFAX—When motorists have a green light, pedestrians often don’t. One Halifax councillor hopes to change that.

At the next meeting of council’s transportation standing committee, Councillor Waye Mason will ask for a staff report on “the elimination throughout HRM of the requirement to press a pedestrian push-button to trigger a crossing.” The buttons, sometimes referred to as pedestrian beg buttons, are located at intersections throughout the municipality.

The request, Mason said in an interview on Monday, covers only those buttons at intersections with red, green and yellow lights — where the traffic signal automatically cycles through, but the pedestrian signal doesn’t.

“There’s nothing worse than seeing pedestrians, especially in the busier parts of downtown Dartmouth and Halifax, get to the light and they didn’t press the button and it has to cycle all the way through before they can even cross again because they didn’t know they had to press the button. It doesn’t make sense to me,” Mason said.

“If we’re truly going for Vision Zero, clearly the pedestrian signal should come up every time the light signal is green.”

The buttons are meant to make it easier for vehicles to get through intersections without having to wait for pedestrians who might not be there.

Mason said the change “may slow down cars at some places and at night” but felt that argument no longer holds weight at a time when road safety, not efficiency for vehicles, is the main concern.

Kelsey Lane, the Ecology Action Centre’s sustainable transportation co-ordinator, supports the move and said the buttons “contradict the pedestrian-first strategy that we approved with the Integrated Mobility Plan,” council’s transportation plan.

“It simply just doesn’t make sense in the current context,” she said in an interview. “If you reversed it and said to a person who was driving, ‘Look, you can’t go through that green light unless you press a button,’ I think there’d be a lot of outrage.”

If Mason’s proposed change went through, there would still be buttons at midblock pedestrian crossings with flashing yellow lights and at midblock traffic lights, called half-signals, like the ones on Quinpool Rd.

Mason said those buttons are important, and it’s the ones at regular signals he’s opposed to.

Lane suggested there could be other uses for buttons as well, like triggering auditory signals for people with visual impairments or making the pedestrian-crossing time longer for people with mobility issues.

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“It’s really about shifting towards a pedestrian-first strategy,” Lane said. “That’s what it looks like, is changing these pieces of infrastructure that were traditionally designed with cars in mind.”

The next transportation standing committee meeting is scheduled for Dec. 13.

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