Members of the Evans Churchill Community Association are pushing for the wide, heavily trafficked Seventh Street to become easier for pedestrians and bicyclists to cross at McKinley Street.
ECCA sent a proposal to the city of Phoenix Street Transportation Department for a High-intensity Activated Crosswalk, or HAWK, signal at Seventh and McKinley streets. The proposal is still pending a response from the Street Transportation Department.
HAWK signals, first developed in Tucson, are light signals at crosswalks that only stop traffic when a pedestrian presses the button. The signals are not four-way, and the proposed intersection would be used to cross Seventh Street at the intersection, which currently has no signals or stops. Seventh Street has no stops between Roosevelt and Fillmore streets.
Matthew Taunton, chair of ECCA’s multimodal transportation committee, authored the proposal to the city. The signal is intended as an accessible link between the Evans Churchill neighborhood, the Garfield neighborhood and other downtown areas.
“I regularly ride to work and walk and bike anywhere I can, and over the years downtown has created a lot of great energy, but it’s still very difficult to get between downtown and adjacent neighborhoods,” Taunton said.
Taunton said a HAWK signal would be a “good short-term solution,” because they are cheaper than full traffic signals and would not prevent future construction of signals.
Thomas Godbee, the deputy street transportation director for Phoenix, said once a proposal like ECCA’s has been submitted, the city undertakes a study of the intersection, looking for “high pedestrian activity” and “consistent patterns of activity.” Nearby residential areas, grocery stores, bus stops and other places that draw pedestrians are important factors in these studies, Godbee said.
The Street Transportation Department only selects study locations once a year and culls possible locations from a list of citizen requests. Godbee said a HAWK signal typically costs $70,000 to $80,000 to build, about half the cost of a full traffic signal. But funding for such signals is dwindling at the moment, Godbee said.
“We’re trying to get federal funding to do more HAWKs in the city because, to be honest, the money is pretty much run out,” Godbee said. “We’re going to do three more this fiscal year and we really don’t have any funding left for the future so we’re trying to get federal money to do future ones and maybe partner with schools like we’ve done in the past to build more.”
But Godbee said the Street Transportation Department is open to improvements for pedestrian traffic on Seventh Street and Seventh Avenue, one of the subjects of the recently announced Phoenix Comprehensive Downtown Transportation Study. Both streets were designed in 1979 to function as high-traffic quasi-highways before there were actual highways. As downtown establishes itself as an urban neighborhood with other available high-traffic options, the role of Seventh Street and Seventh Avenue may change.
“There is discussion for long-term changes for Seventh Street and Seventh Avenue for the downtown area,” Godbee said. “In the near term and long term, we have consultants looking at what the Seventh Street and Seventh Avenue may look like in regard to trying to make them more pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly streets. But it does carry a lot of traffic because of the special events and all the activities that go on downtown and that obviously has to be factored in.”
Sean Sweat, a downtown resident and advocate, said the proposed HAWK signal is “sensible” and would be “better than nothing,” but he would prefer a full traffic signal at the intersection. Sweat said a pedestrian’s perception of intersections that can be safely crossed matters, and high-speed traffic on Seventh Street currently dissuades crossing on foot or by bike.
“Technically, you’re probably just as safe crossing Seventh Street as First Street if you wait for the signal — maybe — but psychologically, you don’t want to do it,” Sweat said. “It feels bad. If someone doesn’t like doing something, they either will find something else to do or find some other way to do it. And that’s why we drive to Welcome Diner. I’ve ridden my bike over to Welcome Diner and I almost peed myself.”
Sweat said traffic engineering can lead to counterintuitive thinking, making design decisions that influence traffic behavior and then basing future decisions on that behavior. Sweat said he believes the current state of Seventh Street and Seventh Avenue reflects this kind of thinking: The streets were originally designed to carry lots of fast traffic, and now that they serve this purpose there has been resistance to redesigning and slimming them down.
“It’s a design cue that the Streets Department has given drivers, saying ‘This is a road you can turn on, and this is a road you can’t,’” Sweat said. “We’ve got to break that. We’ve got to spread our traffic more evenly downtown. We have to make the high-traffic roads more comfortable for pedestrians and low-traffic roads more viable for businesses. Instead of a huge street and a piddling street, we could have medium streets.”
Contact the reporter at bkutzler@asu.edu
