Road signs in St. Paul are shaming drivers into stopping for pedestrians

Drivers in St. Paul, you are being watched at pedestrian crossings.

You may have noticed signs like the one above appearing near crosswalks on St. Paul streets, equal parts shaming drivers for not stopping for pedestrians, and challenging them to do better.

It's the work of the University of Minnesota's HumanFIRST Lab, which is working with the City of Saint Paul on the "Stop For Me" pedestrian safety campaign it started back in April.

As HumanFIRST director Nichole Morris explains on Twitter, her team has been compiling the statistics by crossing 16 crosswalks in the city 20 times, twice a week.

They then note the percentage of cars that stop, pass, put on a hard broke as the pedestrian waits to safely cross the street.

The signs started appearing in early July, and the figures in the picture above and in the tweets below, show that St. Paul drivers haven't started out particularly well.

That said, they're getting better all the time since the sign campaign started, according to Morris.

The city says that researchers are monitoring some of the busiest intersections this summer, including Snelling and Blair Avenues, East 7th Street and Bates, and Summit Avenue and Chatsworth Street South.

Another focus of the "Stop For Me" campaign is "multi-threat crashes," which is where a driver pulls around a vehicle that has stopped for a pedestrian crossing the street on four-lane roads.

Preliminary figures from the Minnesota Department of Public Safety state that in 2017, 38 pedestrians were killed on Minnesota roads, though this was down significantly from the 60 who died in 2016.