Zebra crossing
[4] It is generally attributed to British MP James Callaghan who, in 1948, visited the country's Transport and Road Research Laboratory which was working on a new idea for safe pedestrian crossings.
[2] Pedestrian crossings with Belisha beacons had been in use in the UK since the 1930s, originally introduced under Section 18 of the Road Traffic Act, 1934.
From 1949 to 1951, the then-named Ministry of Transport experimented with designs to improve visibility and increase usage, until the familiar black and white stripes were introduced.
[9] The crossing is characterised by longitudinal stripes on the road, parallel to the flow of the traffic, alternately a light colour and a dark one.
However, this is more expensive than a traditional zebra crossing, and can impede the flow of traffic and response times for emergency vehicles, especially on roads with higher speed limits.
In the United Kingdom, the crossing is marked with Belisha beacons, which are flashing amber globes on black and white posts on each side of the road, named after Leslie Hore-Belisha, the Minister of Transport, who introduced them in 1934.
[15] In the United Kingdom, it is the law that all road users, including motorists, give way to pedestrians who have set foot on a zebra crossing.
[citation needed] In Germany, Scandinavia, and most other European countries, pedestrians have right of way if they are still on the kerb but about to enter the crossing.
In North America, pedestrian crossings are almost exclusively called crosswalks, but depending on the marking style, they can have different names.
Although zebra crossings exist in the US, the term is used to describe a type of diagonal crosswalk with two parallel lines painted over the stripes, similar but not identical to the ladder style.
[21] A 1998 Swedish study by A Várhelyi at Lund University investigated driver behavior at zebra crossings: The frequency of giving way is 5%.
[22]The city of A Coruña in Galicia, Spain, has opted for spots rather than stripes at a pedestrian crossing, resembling a cow instead of a zebra.
[26] Crossings can be combined with speed tables (i.e. raised sections of road designed to physically slow traffic down) as an additional safety measure.
The cover made the crossing a tourist attraction, and it has been incorporated into the Abbey Road Studios logo.
[31] There is also a tongue-in-cheek reference to zebra crossings in the science-fiction comedy The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by English author Douglas Adams, in reference to Man using the improbable creature called the Babel fish as proof of the non-existence of God; the novel says, "Man then goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed at the next zebra crossing."
