THREE pedestrian crossings costing £100,000 are to be installed in Darlington to improve road safety.

The state-of-the-art crossings will be installed on Carmel Road, Woodlands Road and Whinfield Road in the New Year.

The Puffin (Pedestrian User-Friendly Intelligent) crossings were first introduced in Darlington three years ago and since then they have been introduced at various sites throughout the town.

Some of the crossings have been put at notorious accident black-spots, while others have replaced old pelican and zebra crossings which do not use the same advanced technology.

The Puffin crossings contain a number of sensors which detect when pedestrians are standing at the kerb or crossing the road.

The sensors can also tell when there is traffic approaching the crossing.

The signals compute the information from the sensors to ensure pedestrians have enough time to cross the road safely while ensuring traffic is stopped for the shortest time possible. This means the lights will stay red until the crossing is clear, giving elderly people or those with young children more time to cross the road. The areas chosen for the crossings are all in busy areas of Darlington, near schools or residential areas wherepeople have had difficulty crossing the road safely.

Nick Wallis, the Council's Cabinet Member for Highways and Transport said, "These roads are some of the busiest and most difficult to cross in the town.

"The council has received regular complaints from parents of school children and from other road users about these areas so I'm delighted that we can invest in three major road safety schemes on these sites."

The crossing on Carmel Road will be between Millbank Road and Nunnery Lane and will replace the existing island in the middle of the road for people crossing.

Another crossing point on Woodlands Road, to the west of Dene Grove, will be replaced by a Puffin.

On Whinfield Road, the crossing will be installed near to the Springfield pub.