This may sound awfully trivial, but crossing streets is an essential activity for anyone living in a big city. Therefore, it was with great surprise that I found, or rather failed to find, traffic lights for pedestrians around here.
No, it's not about small crossings in lost suburbia but rather streets and roundabouts at the very heart of the city. Strangely enough, quite a few (a lot? most of them?) of the pedestrian crossings in London don't have signalling lights for people who walk, which pretty much means it's every man for himself. I suppose this could work if the drivers were all nice and stopped, but they aren't and they don't. Which actually makes sense. Since they do have lights for cars, they are expected to move when it's green. How should you be aware of that from the sidewalks is beyond me.
I haven't quite understood what's the logic behind this, but one theory that was put forward to me was that you don't really need lights because you can take a peek at the lights for the cars and see if you can move forward. That is, assuming the light is somewhere you can see and that there aren't cars coming from other unexpected directions. Simple.
All in all, this makes for some rather awkward situations. I may be guilty of often disregarding pedestrian lights back at home, but the lack of them is going to get me killed one of these days.
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