Pedestrians crossing the city’s most dangerous intersections will be getting a hand soon from countdown clocks, The Post has learned.
Thousands of the timing devices are going to go up across the five boroughs after an exhaustive 17-month experiment showed that they’re safety boosters — at least for some of the widest streets with the most traffic.
The percentage of pedestrians stuck in crosswalks as the light turned against them on one stretch of Hylan Boulevard on Staten Island fell from 20.3 to 14.9 percent after numerical displays counting down the seconds were added to the standard flashing-hand warning signal.
There was also a significant drop on busy East 14th Street along Third to Fifth Avenues, from 11.8 to 8.8 percent.
“In safety terms, this is huge,” declared Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan.
“People sometimes make risky calls when they’re crossing the street. This takes the guesswork out of the equation.”
She said that “mountains of data” gathered at 25 intersections, all equipped with cameras to capture pedestrian movements, indicated that the improvements were limited to some wide intersections with more than two lanes of traffic.
“They don’t work everywhere,” she conceded. In fact, three of the five tests begun in November 2007 ended in failure.
East Gun Hill Road in The Bronx, one of the wide streets, showed virtually no change after the countdown clocks were added.
Steinway Street along 30th to 34th Avenues in Queens provided evidence that pedestrians couldn’t beat the clock across two lanes of traffic. More ended up being stranded before the clocks came in than afterward. The same held true on 60th Street in Brooklyn.
Nevertheless, Sadik-Khan said the overall results were encouraging, so the timers are coming citywide.
“We will install them in those locations where it will make people safer,” she said.
A record low 256 people were killed in traffic accidents in New York City last year, 155 of them pedestrians.
Officials first decided to test pedestrian clocks in 2006, after Mayor Bloomberg spotted them in other cities and was intrigued.
The initial test was inconclusive, leading to an expanded $800,000 trial that concluded just last month.
There are 90,000 pedestrian signals in the city, and 164 were changed over for the experiment.
“We’ve probably looked more closely at pedestrian countdown signals than anyone has,” said Sadik-Khan.
Williams Woods, 53, a Bronx resident questioned at East Gun Hill Road and DeKalb Avenue, applauded the city’s move as long overdue.
“A friend of mine was hit and lost both her legs here a couple of years ago,” he said. “She would have been safer if they had those back then. I think they should put those all over the city. At least people will know how much time they have to cross.”
Additional reporting by Kevin Fasick