Beacon-Harvard walk signals ill-timed

Over the last two years, Beacon Street in Brookline has seen significant and much-needed upgrades. Besides a new roadway, there have been improvements to sidewalks, curbs, street lighting, traffic signals, and landscaping, and several intersections were redesigned to improve traffic flow and safety at a

cost of nearly $15 million. The MBTA Green Line has also seen some improvements during what was pegged as a three-year project. But tipster Richard Weiser tells GlobeWatch of one so-called improvement in Coolidge Corner that's more like "a potential hazard" at one of the town's busiest crossroads.

"When you cross Beacon Street [at the Harvard intersection] from one side to the other, the walk signal is not properly synchronized to the traffic lights. It's off by at least 10 seconds," writes Weiser in a recent e-mail. "The effect is that people stop when the walk signal turns red, but the traffic light is still red. . . . therefore, people then go ahead and cross the street against the walk signal, hoping that the traffic signal doesn't turn green while they're trying to cross [which it sometimes does]," writes Weiser.

During a visit to the busy intersection one morning last week, a Globe reporter found dozens of pedestrians crossing Beacon Street in both directions with one eye seemingly on walk signals and one on vehicular traffic.

At crosswalks on the north and south side of the intersection, some pedestrians pressed the walk button and waited dutifully at the curb for the signal to change. But most simply crossed regardless of what the signal indicated, assuming it was safe since others were doing so or because drivers on Beacon Street still had a red light.

Though the signals looked brand new and rather fancy, they did appear to be out-of-synch with the traffic signals, as Weiser describes.

Contractors working on behalf of the Massachusetts Highway Department finished the Beacon Street project earlier this year, about one year earlier than expected, said Brookline's Public Works Commissioner, Thomas DeMaio.

But the town still has an 18-page punch list of things that Barletta Heavy Equipment and Mass Highway need to address before the project is officially wrapped up, he said.

Chief among the items is the timing of traffic and pedestrian signals at intersections up and down Beacon Street, audio control functions on the pedestrian signals, and a number of handicapped accessibility issues, said DeMaio. The town will not sign off on the project until everything is done on that list, a timeline he estimates at about six to eight months more.

In the meantime, DeMaio said, town engineers will take a look at the pedestrian signal on the south side of Beacon Street that only seemed to work if it was manually pressed.

"If it can be adjusted, we'll adjust it," he said.