BEST PRACTICES FOR SCHOOLS - ADD A HANDHELD SIGN

This update is for Friday, July 8.  Today was the first experiment with the megaphone. Now that the two camera locations are fixed, the opportunity arises to do performances in the crosswalk, aimed at the vehicles. 

The night before, I composed a message and generated an AWS Polly audio file of it. The track says: "Please respect the red light!" in a female voice twice before launching into a tour guild recitation of the locale including a musical clip from the song "YMCA" to introduce the YMCA building to the right of the crosswalk. I planned to play this while the crosswalk light was red to encourage bikes to stop.

I got into the crosswalk at 11:26 AM and started first the downstream cam and then the upstream cam. I ran this setup for just over an hour without interruption. I did not call the red light myself but let the pedestrians do as they may. When they called the red light, I walked around in front of the crosswalk and played the audio message "Please respect the red light!" over and over again. You can see the downstream video on iCloud here and the upstream video here.

The megaphone worked surprisingly well but I had to keep playing the "Please respect the red light!" part over and over instead of the full audio. Virtually all tourist bikes stopped. The horse-drawn carriages and pedicabs have already been conditioned by my first five weeks in the crosswalk, so compliance with them is already high, bordering on comradery. On every cycle, some bikes, pedicabs, and carriages dove thru anyway, but the downstream camera caught all of their faces so the setup is working.

Tonight's screengrab is an example of best practices as exemplified by the YMCA teachers. This teacher, leading a class across our crosswalk is holding a visual aid - a handheld stop sign - for vehicles to remind them that it is necessary to stop while this group is crossing. All the schools in the area using this crosswalk should do something similar.