Lamenting a Pedestrian's Experience on a Crosswalk and Measuring Delay at Signals

One of the smartest men in the Transportation Business, Darcy Bullock from Purdue University is visiting Portland the first part of this week to share some thoughts on arterial performance measurement. Darcy is a distinguished colleague and research professor at Purdue University. I was reviewing some older documentation and came across this gem he shared in 2008.

 “ A downtown shopper needed a fourleaf clover, a voodoo charm, and a St. Christopher's medal to make it in one piece from one curbstone to the other. As far as I was concerned--a traffic engineer with Methodist leanings--I didn't think that the Almighty should be bothered with problems which we, ourselves, were capable of solving.”
-Henry A. Barnes, traffic commissioner in Denver, Baltimore, and New York City, as referenced in Barnes'
autobiography, The Man With the Red and Green Eyes (E. P. Dutton and Company, 1965)

Source: Darcy Bullock Presentation at the TRB Traffic Signal Systems Committee Meeting in 2009 on Pedestrians.