Mr Belisha’s Beacons, and the Passing of the Zebra crossing
It seems that the old British Zebra crossing, feebly imitated in the USA with narrow-striped crosswalks, is to disappear almost everywhere. Instead we will have Pandas and Pelicans, as they are childishly called.
An increasingly immoral and lawless British people are ignoring Zebra crossings more and more. I know this very well from personal experience. It is deeply unwise to rely on drivers stopping even if you are already in the middle of the road. Last year in the middle of Manchester I was almost run over by a driver who simply did not have a clue that he was supposed to stop. There were two policemen guarding a party conference a few feet away, and I recruited them to explain to the driver that he should have stopped. In my view he should have spent the rest of the day, and possibly the night, in the cells, and had his car crushed into a cube, but the police are much too busy protecting the political elite to bother with minor things like homicidal carelessness on the road.
Most of my fellow cyclists, of course, have concluded that zebra crossings don’t apply to them at all, behaviour that sends me into red mist territory. Their lives all depend on other road-users abiding by the rules. Don’t they owe a similar duty to pedestrians, next down in the food chain?
The alternative is the misleadingly-named ‘pedestrian controlled’ crossing, where you press a button, and wait for as long as a minute for a traffic light to change to red. In many cases, it is possible to cross well before this long wait is over, so drivers are frustrated to come up to a red light which is serving no purpose. Also, because pedestrians tend to think that drivers are legally obliged to stop at these lights (which of course they are, but so what?) they don’t bother to give a wave of thanks and stalk across without so much as a nod. Both these features of modern life harden the hearts of drivers, who grow ever more impatient of stopping without being thanked, or stopping for no good reason.
I jeer at the name ‘pedestrian-controlled’ because in fact the old Zebra crossings are genuinely pedestrian-controlled. You have an absolute freedom to step out and expect traffic to stop for you. The new devices take that freedom away from you, and award it to a variable and unpredictable timing device which operates according to no known law. In my home town there are some crossings where the light invariably changes in ten seconds, others where it can take more than a minute, others where it can vary between 20 seconds and more than a minute, for no observable reason. One in particular seems to be programmed to wait until there is no traffic approaching from either direction (quite a while) before uselessly changing.
Also, they bleep to signal the (often very short) time in which the pedestrian has lawful priority. This must be infuriating for anyone who lives nearby.
When these crossings were introduced in 1934 by the then Transport Minister, the odd but interesting Leslie Hore-Belisha, they had only the flashing yellow beacons which came to bear his name, plus some chrome studs in the road. The Zebra stripes were introduced only in the 1950s. Other countries copied the idea , but with differing success. I remember being warned before a first visit to Paris in 1965 that in that city the Zebra-like crossings in that city were not to be taken seriously by anyone who wanted to live long.
The French simply did not have the same self-restraint which we then possessed (and have now lost) . In the USA, where walking is a sort of crime against the national religion (yes, the car), crosswalks are largely ignored. In fact, when I tried to slow down for them when I lived there, I was hooted contemptuously, and soon gave up, like everyone else. By contrast, the ‘Stop’ sign was universally observed, so proving that Americans do have the capacity for self-restraint, but only towards their equals, ie other drivers in large cars. Interestingly, the USA has the same view of pedestrians as continental countries, that they are a nuisance, and so it is an actual offence to cross the road against the lights, even if there’s nothing coming.
On a visit to Canada, I was ashamed and embarrassed when I drove as I would have done in the USA. For there, with the far more British style of manners and self-restraint, crosswalks are (or were) observed. Not realising this, I drove across one in front of some waiting pedestrians, and blushed deeply when I saw in my rear-view mirror the Canadian drivers courteously stopping as they might have done in Pitlochry or Ludlow. My only relief came from the fact that my rented car had New York plates, so everyone had probably assumed the worst anyway.
These details of life are fascinating insights into the real differences between us and others, and the real difference between the past and the present. I’m sorry that the Zebra crossing is dying, but I’m not surprised, given all the other things that are passing at the same time. In Soviet Moscow, there used to be dead pedestrians lying beside the roads, as often as not, sometimes attended by grimy ambulances. In Cairo and Teheran, you sometimes can’t cross the road at all, unless you can assemble a crowd to cross with you, or get a local friend to act as a human shield.