Last week, my local social media groups began posting about a temporary change that’s being made to the traffic patterns at our famous intersection, Toomer’s Corner.
It’s an incredibly busy corner that gets a lot of motorized and pedestrian traffic during football season.
In fact, our campus is fairly small, so people walk everywhere.
The local powers that be decided to test out an X-crossing, also known as a pedestrian scramble.
I’m slightly terrified.
Here are the rules, in a nutshell.
Basically, each cross street’s vehicular traffic (including bikes and scooters) will get its own turn to pass through.
Then, if someone has pressed the walk signal, lights will go red for all motorized traffic to allow pedestrians to cross.
The kicker is that people can move diagonally rather than crossing the street twice. That’s always been a pain – waiting each time to cross twice.
I drive through this intersection a minimum of twice a day, and sometimes I walk through a couple of times if I decide to snag a fresh cookie down the street or grab lemonade from Toomer’s Drugs.
Here’s a link to an article that explains the do’s and don’t’s of this experiment.
One of my main concerns, as a driver, is someone who decides to jaywalk. I hope law enforcement will be present to gently remind/warn these people.
I’m also concerned about people who habitually turn right on red.
It’s these cars that often back up traffic because they get stuck waiting for walkers to cross the street.
It’s a mess, y’all between 4:45 and 5:00, when the college closes for the day.
Monday, I worked Tiger Tables, which is part of Camp War Eagle, Auburn’s orientation for incoming freshmen. I rode with a couple of other people from my building, and on the way back, we drove through Toomer’s Corner.
There was confusion.
The lights weren’t working properly.
People were jaywalking.
Thank goodness I can’t drive right now.
Over the course of the week, we’ve driven through almost daily, and I think people are starting to get the hang of it.
Football season is coming though, and we will have a lot of visitors here every weekend.
Heck, with Fall semester quickly approaching, our population is about to increase exponentially, which means a lot of new-to-us drivers trying to learn all of the things.
I am hopeful that people will embrace the new procedures that the new traffic flow will be more efficient. I pray that nobody gets hurt while we are all adjusting to the new rules.
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