Demetrius Williams & Zachary Stansbury | GNP contributors
On a Spring semester day, over about two hours, 36 pedestrians choose not to use the designed crosswalk on 10th street by Umstead Residence Hall.
They were among the 100 people the Greenville News Project counted on its “bird watch” at the crosswalk.
Forty-two of them crossed after pressing the button to set off the crosswalk’s Rapid Flashing Beacon to warn drivers of pedestrians in the roadway. Twenty-two used the crosswalk but did not active beacon.
Even with the flashing beacon, feeling crossing busy streets around campus is a sometimes thing. “They used to have a police car out here, and that made me feel a bit better I wasn’t going to get run over in the street,” said student Alyssa Clark.
Other students say beacons or not, pedestrian in the crosswalk or not, some drivers just drive through.
ECU is aware of the problem, said its police chief, Jason Sugg, and the university is planning to install a new kind of crossing beacon at the 10th Street crosswalk by Umstead.
It is called a HAWK—High Intensity Activated Crosswalk—beacon signal. It is a pedestrian-controlled red light similar to the standard light system at roadway intersections.
Unlike the flashing beacons, the HAWK displays a red stop light to drivers. They must stop their vehicles, not slow down but keep rolling as some do at the flashing beacons. And certainly not drive through.
Lots of people in the mix
Installing safety features at crosswalks and intersections is not an easy process. A safety problem first must be documented. Then a request for a safety feature must be made to the government entity that own the road. That could be the city or state or the university.
Sugg said that ECU police regularly monitor the roads around campus. “What we’ll do is say hey guys, while you’re out” on routine patrols, “spend some time watching this particular area, and they’ll do what we call a traffic survey,” he said.
The police department reports findings of concern to the state Department of Transportation or the city of Greenville or both.
For the city’s part, “We get [also] requests in from the public, through the city’s website or by the public calling in, or things we happen to see if you know we are doing quarter studies,” said city traffic engineer Richard Dicesare.
He is part of a traffic safety task force with assistant traffic engineer Stacey Pigford and Deputy Chief Chris Ivey of the city police department.
Pigford said that as far as students go, they don’t tend to reach out with traffic safety complaints.
“Typically, the only time I get student calls is if there’s a pedestrian push button not working at one of the intersections right there around the college,” she said. “That's typically the only time a student will call.”
Not every request for a new traffic light or crosswalk beacon gets approved, Dicesare said. “We just don’t put them anywhere or everywhere where people think they need to be. There needs to be a certain pedestrian vibe,” he said.
Ivey added that “everybody, including the ECU Police Department and ECU administration, have a piece in that traffic safety task force, so what we would ask is if a student has got a safety concern that they can take it to their ECU Police Department.”
Comes down to awareness
Ultimately, Dicesare said, “We can’t force people to use the crosswalks.” And for ECU, “that becomes education on [its] end. It has to tell students that when [beacon lights] get put in, you gotta use them.”
The NCDOT’s Lauren Haviland also said that educating pedestrians on the need use crosswalk safety feature is important. She noted that the streets around ECU are busy.
The DOT’s 2022 traffic counts found a daily average of 23,000 vehicles traveling on 10th Street. That includes cars that passed over the traffic counter one time and those that passed more than once as their drivers went to-and-fro up and down the street.
Cotanche Street had an average daily count of 13,000 vehicles and Evans Street had a count of 16,000.
Associate Vice Chancellor Bill Koch said the university has its ways of getting traffic safety information out to students. One of those ways, he said, involves a “Pedestrian Safety” page on the website of the university’s Office of Environmental Health and Safety.
Koch oversees Campus Safety and Auxiliary Services.
But the page is not easy to find. The office’s homepage does not hold a link to the “Pedestrian Safety” page. To find it, one must be determined to find it. GNP found it by using the search box on the ECU main page.
The pedestrian page holds a large, annotated photograph of the 14th Street crosswalk at the College Hill residence halls and a paragraph of text dated June 21, 2022, that says, “ECU is concerned about the safety of pedestrians on and adjacent to campus.”
A link at the bottom of that page goes to another that lists crosswalk rules for motorists and pedestrians, and links to pedestrian safety information on external websites.
Web traffic data shows that over the past year, the “Pedestrian Safety” webpage has had 77 individual visitors. That includes GNP reporters. GNP obtained the data from the university’s Information Technology and Computer Services department.
That level of use is a drop in the bucket when compared to ECU’s average 2023-2024 enrollment of 25,761 students.
Koch later noted that the “Pedestrian Safety” page tops the page in Google and Bing searches for such terms as “ECU pedestrian.” It tops the page on searches from ECU’s homepage for “pedestrian” and “pedestrian safety.”
Still, “we will look into ways we can improve getting this information to the campus community,” he said.
Williams and Stansbury produced this story for the course, In-depth Reporting Capstone, at the School of Communication, East Carolina University.
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