How many trials were actually undertaken in Westminster and any other kind of general points to follow on from what Dean and Hayden were talking about?

Yeah, we initially looked at something like 18 trials locations where there was a mix of side road treatment so some of these junctions either already had standard zebra crossings with belisha beacons and zigzags some of them had continuous footways the copenhagen crossing type arrangement other junctions had simple entry treatments with perhaps raised crossings or crossing areas tabletop crossing areas and others didn't have any infrastructure at all just to drop kerbs so the first task was to understand how drivers were behaving already without some junctions with markings and some junctions without and as Dean says that gave us an idea of how drivers would behave at standard zebra crossings and we found that something like 70 or 80 percent of drivers tended to give way to pedestrians when they were using a proper crossing where there weren't any markings or any formal crossings, the compliance rates, as we call them, so where the drivers complied with the highway code rules, the rates were very low, sometimes as low as 20%, 30%.

It did depend on what movement the drivers and cyclists were making.

And the right turn into the junction was always the worst performing, but some pretty low compliance rates.

So we had this data before sites for 18 different junctions, and this was way more than was looked at previously in Manchester and Cardiff.

And then the zebra crossing trials we selected from a few of the sites that didn't have any markings, we selected 11 different sites, that was 13 crossings, so some of the junctions have got crossings either side of the junction.

So we're now trialling 13 sites and they've all been implemented now.

It did make me think it's kind of a good example of the nudge theory where you put a relatively... simple change in the environment and it can have a big change on people's behavior and keith you'd given an indication of before and after the compliance being pretty low before and then it went up to about 80 i think after implementation which is which is great i think it was what was it before was about 30 or so you can clarify if i'm wrong on that but uh what about the bits where there's persistent issues still because there's still a bit of a gap and how do you deal with that either in design terms or communication or how does that work I mean there's it feels like it's been a markedly better from before and after generally massive success but there is still a margin to go

The redesign of what was a busy gyratory at Aldwych was thanks in part to traffic engineer Keith Firth of the consultancy Norman Rooke Prime.

Strand Aldwych is a major intersection at, um, four roads, uh, in Central London.

The roads were heavily trafficked.

There was about 3,000 vehicles an hour going around the gyratory, 200 buses, so it was a horrendous, congested, highly polluted traffic gyratory.

So this is why we created a pedestrian and cycle zone.

Keith Firth, traffic engineer, says that there's another problem with getting rid of traffic lights.

At a traffic signal junction, there will be a stage where pedestrians get a green signal to cross.

If the lights fail or if you switch the traffic signals off, then this stage completely disappears, so all of the time that was given to allow a safe crossing of pedestrians is removed.