A herd of 3D zebras

Back in March 2019, Westminster City Council installed an experimental zebra crossing in St John's Wood, London, with a 3D effect that was supposed to confuse drivers into slowing down. The experiment would, they said, run for a year.

We covered the original experiment in the days after it was first installed in a blog post last year. Our initial impression was that the 3D markings were not so effective that anyone would genuinely think there were a series of elevated blocks across the road, and that the grey shading used to create the effect actually made the white stripes less visible to approaching traffic. But it was an experiment, and the whole point is to remain open minded about the possible outcome until the results are known.

There's no word yet from Westminster whether their experiment has produced results yet, or whether there's any indication that the crossing has improved safety on St John's Wood High Street where it was installed. But someone at the council must like them, because at least three more have already been installed.

One is on Blandford Street, at its junction with Manchester Street, between the A5 Edgware Road and the B524 Marylebone High Street. Two more are on the periphery of Hyde Park Square on the other side of Edgware Road. All three are too new to appear on Google Streetview, though the one on Strathearn Place, at the southwestern corner of Hyde Park Square, was half-way installed last time the cameras visited.

It's not clear whether they are also part of the experiment, or whether Westminster is now just installing them as a matter of course, but the evidence suggests that the council are conducting a trial at multiple sites, not just at the one location in St John's Wood that was widely reported last year.

For one thing, all the crossings are new: no existing zebra crossings seem to have been converted to use the new design. The other evidence in favour of that idea is that they all appear to have been installed in July 2019, three months in to the St John's Wood trial, when no meaningful conclusions could yet have been drawn. Local blog Hyde Park Now covered the installation of the crossing on Blandford Street in July last year, and the Streetview images showing the Strathearn Place crossing as a work-in-progress were taken the same month.

At the time the St John's Wood crossing was installed, Westminster City Council made much of a study from New Delhi in India, where 3D crossing markings had reduced traffic speeds from 50km/h to 30km/h on average. But observations of the crossings here suggested that a similar drastic impact was unlikely to happen. Indeed, every other mention of the crossings that has appeared online since then has been fairly sceptical.

We will, of course, keep an eye out for the results of Westminster's 3D experiment, if and when it appears. Until then our advice would be to visit this specific corner of central London if you want to see a 3D zebra in the flesh, because we're not convinced the herd will grow much bigger.