How You Cross the Street Largely Depends on Where You're From

During six weeks in Tokyo last year I noticed that Japanese pedestrians did something that walkers in Manhattan rarely do: they waited to cross the street until the signal permitted. In my (admittedly limited) experience, I found this to be the case even when crossing would have required just a few total steps, and even when there were absolutely no cars in sight. When I asked my interpreter about this habit one day, she told me that most Japanese, as a general rule, obeyed laws to the letter.

Evidently others have been as fascinated by this cultural difference as I was, judging by a new study of cross-cultural pedestrian behavior conducted by an international research team. The group set up observations posts at various crossings in the French city of Strasbourg and the Japanese city of Inuyama. The sites, according to the coordinates given in the study, were somewhere around here in Inuyama —