Crossing the Road

Crossing the road in South Korea is a lot more controlled than it is in Canada. I don't know what the penalty is for "jay walking" (is that how you spell that?) but not too many people do it here. They have two controlled ways of crossing the road. There is the simple crosswalk and the underground passages.

The simple crosswalks have the big white lines as you see and they have a red/green stick man light indicator. The fascinating part about this is when it's green and time is running out rather than the flashing green man like back home, they have an arrow indicator on the left that counts down. It takes forever to get a green crosswalk signal and the amazing part is that most people wait for it. I still sometimes just look both ways and cross if there aren't any cars.

They also have underground crosswalks. The major intersections have an entrance at each side and everyone walks down and comes up where they need too. I think this would be very useful in downtown Toronto to control pedestrian crossings. However, they would have a hard time building it now and I wonder how many people would actually use it since they're all used to crossing whenever they want.