Info

Item author
Scarlett Poon
Item Created
15 Jun 2010
Photo taken on
16 Jun 2010 10:30 pm
14 Jun 2010 3:09 pm
14 Jun 2010 3:05 pm
Photo author
Scarlett Poon

Old man crossing red light

An old man crossing with his walking sticks while red light is on. He did not look around but just walked straight.

carefully crossing red lights

people crossed when red lights on, but looked on both sides first.

Crossing without looking

the girl was crossing while checking her back pack, not paying attention to the light nor the road.


Context of the observation

In this location, we observed for 3 days, each day for one hour. During the observation, a lot of people tend to cross the street with red light on. Everyone behaves differently when they cross: some look around first, some just look straight, some are listening to their music, some are talking on the phone or talking to their friends. Different people are crossing: kids, young people, old people, bikers.

At the same time, compares to pedestrian, there are way less cars passing than people crossing. Most of the cars are on the sides of the road parking but not movi

 

 

Location

köln
Germany

 

2 Interpretations

This street is very small and most of the time there is no cars. Maybe because of this, most of the people tend to be quite relax even red light is on as there is no cars anyway.

Scarlett Poon
17 Jun 2010

Green lights suggest 'go' and red lights suggest 'stop', it is like common sense to know this.
In some streets, most of the time it is not busy at all, people cross it even the red light is on as it is completely safe to do so. In here it is like 'red' does not mean 'stop' to them anymore. The nature of the traffic lights is to help the drivers and pedestrians, to help the traffic, make it safer and more efficient. But in some cases, these rules just do not work so well. It is even more efficient if we just ignore them, like cross the road when there is no cars, save some time instead of waiting in front of the light for 5 minutes while there is no cars at all. But maybe in some cultures, it is more important to obey the rules than being faster, it really depends on the situation. But in this place, Overall, people seem really relax when crossing even its red light, it does not seem to bother them. They do not really rush to cross the road.

Scarlett Poon
25 Jun 2010

3 Questions & 0 Responses

Are red lights useful? Where is it useful or where is it not?

Scarlett Poon
17 Jun 2010

How do people cross? how do people wait?

Scarlett Poon
17 Jun 2010

Apart from the light, what factors affecting the pedestrian to cross or not?

Scarlett Poon
25 Jun 2010