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Beep Boop

Made by Amber Jones, Teddy Lee, Jacob Slone and Kristen Smith

Our intended goal is to keep people from jaywalking, and as a result, promote safety in congested intersections. The crosswalk on Forbes Avenue is a perfect example of a place to watch pedestrian behavior. When people intend to cross the street, they’re checking for three factors to allow them to do so - a red traffic light, the crosswalk sound, and the stop hand on the crosswalk sign. Currently, there is a prevalent gap in time between the sound cutoff, when the stop hand on the traffic light turns solid, and when the traffic light turns green.If we were to make the stop hand and crosswalk sound cohesive, this would allow people a better understanding of when to cross the street, and when to not do so. Our plan is to not only change how the crosswalk signal sounds, but to also change how the stop hand reacts to the crosswalk signal. We believe that if we were to replace the beep-boop sound with notes that speed up to let the pedestrians know when the crossing time is running out, their behavior would change. People generally conform to the beat of music, so if the notes on the crosswalk speed up to indicate that they’re running out of time, a pedestrian would understand whether they should cross quickly or wait until the next light. One major example of this is the classic tune on Jeopardy which signals the elapsing of a contestant's time. Similarly, if we were to replace the stop hand with-- or add to it-- a countdown clock that is synced with the notes, this would prevent several people from jaywalking, thus increasing their chances of crossing the street safely.

Created: September 5th, 2014

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With the large volume of students crossing high traffic roads like Fifth and Forbes Ave. to walk to campus every day, safety at the crosswalks becomes an issue. These innate dangers are amplified by many students engaging in dangerous jaywalking in order to remain on time with their busy schedules.

We propose that this issue can be alleviated by providing pedestrians with more information at each crosswalk, and the more successful we are at relaying that information in a transparent way, the more likely that information will be used subconsciously as well. Since most of the crosswalks around campus already produce noise to indicate it is safe to cross, we decided to work with this existing technology.

We predict that if the beeping of the crosswalk was modified such that the rate of the beeps increased as the time left to cross diminished, this information could be used intuitively by pedestrians to gauge the amount of time they have to cross more accurately. Additionally, it seems likely that the increase in the rate of the beeps would subconsciously pressure pedestrians to speed up to match their strides with the beeps.

The biggest potential problem seems to be with the beeps themselves, as the noise could become very irritating. However, with sufficient experimentation it seems that this could be alleviated, and this experimentation could take place without actually implementing the system and implementing the system itself should be a low cost, high impact firmware fix that will subtly affect the lives of the thousands of people who use these heavily trafficked crossings weekly. Furthermore, this likely will not prevent people from crossing the streets away from the crosswalks, and there will likely still be people running across after the light has changed, but it seems to be a step in the right direction. 

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10 comments · Latest by Ivan Wang

Saw this on my newsfeed and it reminded me of your project :) http://sfglobe.com/?id=13124

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Our intended goal is to keep people from jaywalking, and as a result, promote safety in congested intersections. The crosswalk on Forbes Avenue is a perfect example of a place to watch pedestrian behavior. When people intend to cross the street, they’re checking for three factors to allow them to do so - a red traffic light, the crosswalk sound, and the stop hand on the crosswalk sign. Currently, there is a prevalent gap in time between the sound cutoff, when the stop hand on the traffic light turns solid, and when the traffic light turns green.If we were to make the stop hand and crosswalk sound cohesive, this would allow people a better understanding of when to cross the street, and when to not do so.

Our plan is to not only change how the crosswalk signal sounds, but to also change how the stop hand reacts to the crosswalk signal. We believe that if we were to replace the beep-boop sound with notes that speed up to let the pedestrians know when the crossing time is running out, their behavior would change. People generally conform to the beat of music, so if the notes on the crosswalk speed up to indicate that they’re running out of time, a pedestrian would understand whether they should cross quickly or wait until the next light. One major example of this is the classic tune on Jeopardy which signals the elapsing of a contestant's time. Similarly, if we were to replace the stop hand with-- or add to it-- a countdown clock that is synced with the notes, this would prevent several people from jaywalking, thus increasing their chances of crossing the street safely.