Results tagged “scrambleintersections”

At 10:01 a.m. this morning, one of the five green-jacketed police officers standing on the corners of Yonge and Bloor walked confidently but carefully into the middle of the road. The traffic lights at the intersection had just been deactivated, and were now blank, and, after stopping cars in all directions, he waved one direction of cars through, then stopped it, then waved through the other. It was a brief moment of forced acclimatization for the drivers and reassurance for the pedestrians waiting on the tips of the corners: another officer a few minutes earlier had joked to pedestrians that "you don't want to be the first one to be hit by a car." A second later, the traffic lights were all back on, a solid red for all drivers in all directions, and the little stickmen beamed white from every pedestrian signal box. Inside a stopped van, one male driver gestured to his female passenger back and forth across the intersection in front of him, explaining what this all was, and the pedestrians followed his lead.

Every weekday morning, bright and early, we feature a photo (or two) from a photographer in the Torontoist Flickr Pool. It's our way of giving the many excellent photographers in our pool the attention they deserve.

Contributor Tony Makepeace is taking us for some spins around our city with his panoramas. You can look up, down, side to side, in, and out—pretty much every direction but back at yourself, which would be kind of creepy. Say hello to Panoramaist, the Toronto shoe-gazer's worst enemy.

Toronto gave scramble intersections their first shot on city streets in more than fifty years, as one launched yesterday at Yonge and Dundas. NOW had a video of it yesterday, Spacing's Wire will have a timelapse video shot by Sam Javanrouh later today (here's a preview), and we might have something extra-special on Torontoist this weekend. Never has legally crossing a street been so exciting.

It's so beautiful it doesn't even look like Toronto. Not that Toronto can't be beautiful, but there's a certain otherworldliness to these images. This is something we see in other cities, not here.

Toronto Police have just announced [PDF] that the Yonge-Dundas scramble lights, which stop vehicular traffic in all four directions at the intersection simultaneously to allow pedestrians to cross in whatever direction they want, are going into effect as of 11 a.m. Thursday morning. The city, which also briefly experimented with a scramble intersection (also know as the Barnes Dance) in the 1950s, has not-so-elegantly re-anointed it "the Pedestrian Priority Phase."

Image of The Star's coverage from June 21, 1954.

Something about this picture is about to change.