The Pedestrian Countdown trial was conducted in 2010 for Transport for London by consultancy Transport Research Laboratory (TRL).
The “blackout” phase used at pedestrian junctions where neither the green nor red man is showing was replaced by a “countdown” phase, where a timer counts down the seconds that pedestrians have to finish crossing the road.
A number of other changes were also made to signal timings, for both road traffic and pedestrians. The following is a summary:
| Pedestrian phases |
Increase |
Decrease |
| Green man |
X |
|
| Blackout/countdown |
X |
|
| Pedestrian red |
X |
|
| Total pedestrian time |
X |
|
| Road traffic phases | ||
| Green |
X |
|
| Red |
X |
– “Pedestrian red” is the grace period at the end of the pedestrian phase where the red man appears but road traffic signals are still red.
– “Blackout” is the period for pedestrians after the green man where there is no green or red man showing, and is the phase wholly replaced with Countdown.
Changes in time
We have composed the following graphs with data from the TRL Technical Appendices (see below), which show average changes to both pedestrians and road traffic timings across all sites:
Changes to pedestrian time
Changes to road traffic time
N.B. “After” in the pedestrian phase is the “After 1” trial, immediately after PcATS is installed. The appendices do not contain the figures for the tweaked “After 2” trial, three months later, though we are told the green time is the same. We can infer from the decreased green and increased red time that road traffic faces in the After 2 trial (compared to After 1) that either blackout/countdown or pedestrian red time (or both) is slightly increased.
Documents
Transport for London published a summary report following the trial:
Pedestrian Countdown Project Report
It contains several unpublished appendices which we have obtained through Freedom of Information request and publish here for your perusal.
Appendix C – Additional Video and Observation Data
London Transport Data 
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