More Haste Less Speed - Crossing Roads

I'm sure most of you reading this are familiar with road crossings that feature red and green lights for cars with associated red and green lights for people trying to cross the road. As a pedestrian you push a button to tell the road crossing computer you want to cross, the lights for the cars turn to red, the cars stop (well except some taxis who drive through anyway) and then a green man shows to pedestrians who are then allowed to cross.

I remember one time being with some Germans walking through town and seeing their shock at us Englanders just crossing roads when the red man was showing. In their eyes the red man was an order to HALT! and we were brazenly breaking the rules. Truly shocking. It is normal in the UK though, and people often try and anticipate when the light will turn red for the cars, so they can start to cross then, rather than waiting the extra few seconds for the green man to come. Of course, the extra seconds are designed to help you avoid the psycho taxi driver jumping the lights. If you know a junction well, you can save yourself quite a lot of time every day with this kind of technique.

The phenomenon I've seen a lot recently, especially in Edinburgh but back home too, is people ignoring the red and green man and looking so intently at the cars to see when they are going to stop, that they totally fail to notice that the green man has popped on so they can cross. It tends to happen on wide roads, so you need to take notice of cars a long way away, where you can't directly see whether the light for the cars is red or green. So many times this week I've walked past people, staring intently at the slowing cars, towards the green man. And they always look annoyed as I go past.