Flashing Warning For Motorists In Woodland Park

WOODLAND PARK – Woodland Park is adding a little flash to its efforts to make a popular area safer.On Monday, two new pedestrian crossing signs went up near Bergstrom Park at the intersection of Highway 24 and Center Lane. They come with flashing yellow lights to alert motorists that pedestrians have the right of way.”What we do is replicate the lights of a police car so, when it does come on, the first thing people do is take their foot off the gas and put on the brakes,” said Richard Jones of Stop Experts, a Florida company.It’s state of the art technology that has just been approved by the federal government. Jones said it comes with an impressive success rate with between 82% to 95% of drivers responding to the flashing lights. That compares well to previous studies of standard flashing yellow lights, they scored a high of 40% response from drivers and that was four decades ago.”This type of flashing sequence broke every record the federal highway as ever recorded for controlling traffic with just yellow lights,” said Jones “Not broke it; Shattered it.” Woodland Park has not seen tragedy in the area involving cars versus pedestrians but Bill Alspach, an engineer who’s the director of Public Works, believes this is a necessary step towards a safer community.”Fortunately there have been no accidents here,” said Alspach. “We’ve had lots of near misses and close calls but we haven’t had an accident.””We’ve being proactive here about putting this system in to help so that doesn’t happen.”Other cities to add the Stop Experts system include Boulder, Nederland and Montrose. Woodland Park says the Colorado Department of Transportation is paying for part of the install because they’ll own one of the two lights.