The first time you see the intersection of Washington and Atlantic Avenues, it’s a shock. Walking through the quiet, leafy streets of brownstone Brooklyn, you suddenly hit an eight-lane highway of roaring traffic. This stretch of Atlantic Avenue looks more like I95 than something you could cross on foot. But there’s plenty of foot traffic. The booming neighborhoods of Prospect Heights and Clinton Hill meet here, and the C subway stop is just a block away.
The crosswalk is so dangerous that, from 2000 to 2010, over 40 pedestrians and cyclists were struck here. That same decade, car crashes plowed over the Atlantic Ave. median, knocking down the stoplight, not once but twice. This is the same median pedestrians routinely use for refuge. The street is so wide and the crosswalk timing so short that pedestrians often can’t make it across. Clearly, someone needed to fix this intersection.
While it was more of a life-safety problem than a design problem, we took it on as a pro-bono case. Since we’re architects, our first step was to draw up a solution. In our plan, curb extensions would shorten the crosswalks, and bollards would protect the medians (and any pedestrians stuck at the unlucky stoplight). Next, we started a petition, roped in the block association and the community board, wrote letters and newspaper articles, and enlisted the support of local officials. Finally, we partnered with the DOT to effect a change.
The results have been dramatic. The DOT went above and beyond our proposals. They also eliminated turns, widened the median, increased crosswalk times, installed countdown clocks, planted traffic-calming trees, added bike lanes, and most recently changed the last block of Underhill Ave. into a pedestrian plaza. Now, Atlantic Avenue is still a major artery, but crossing at Washington is a piece of cake.
