Pedestrianity at the lights

This is another of my pet peeves: traffic lights for pedestrians. They vary so much but I really find myself wondering about the way that the timing systems are designed. Sometimes it seems that there is a reasonable amount of thought involved in the system design, at others, and more often, it seems like pedestrians are definitely not really thought of except as another traffic flow. The difficulty with this latter matter is that pedestrians aren't cars and our psychology isn't the same as a driver's.

Concretely: I walk a lot in urban areas. I find it vexing to feel dutiful and so wait for a green man when it appears that there is no vehicle traffic moving, doubly so when it becomes apparent that there have been periods of time sufficient to let me cross when no vehicles moved. Triply vexing when it seems likely that this is because they haven't really considered pedestrians as such, merely as another element in the sequence; so our ability to get across need not be subject to quite the same timing constraints as for motorised traffic. (Though conversely, it is a bit concerning that the bleeping crossing indicators seem to assume that people walk at my high speed: they probably need about 5 seconds more for most people)

It actually becomes dangerous when this isn't attended to properly. Why? Because pedestrians move slower and so (relatively small) distances have greater significance to us. It may not seem as bad to wait for 30 seconds in a car, somehow, but knowing you could have crossed the road and be 30 yards nearer your destination as a walker is significant. So, having too long to wait at traffic lights breeds impatience and tends to nudge pedestrians to cross, sometimes at risky points in the cycle. I wonder if there is any research into this, and if there is, whether anyone has actually tried using it to design fitter-for-purpose traffic light systems for pedestrians.

What would help would be to design light sequences either to be more responsive to pedestrian presence or to allow more frequent crossing making waiting time never more than 30 seconds or to do what China and Japan seem to do and have countdowns telling you how much time you have to cross which gives you the autonomy to make the informed choice.

Hell is others in the sense, here, of having to suffer the unthinking design choices of others and what I shrewdly suspect is prejudice against non-motorised road users.

it is worth recalling that except on motorways, in GB pedestrians actually have right of way, I understand, so the red and green figures are advisory. (I may be wrong). In Germany, by contrast, they are mandatory and you could be fined for crossing when the red figure shows -so I was given to understand.