Normally when you need to wait at a crossing because it’s red you take out your phone to waste some time. But you have to be quite anxious and look up if it’s already green or not, otherwise you miss the green light.
But they help you out with that here in Korea by building in the traffic light into the curb. You’re looking down on your phone and see the red line left and right of it. Once it changes to green you immediately are aware of it because it’s in your field of view constantly.
Great invention!
I took the background picture just outside and put the stock picture hands with a phone on top of it so you can easier visualize it how it looks like in reality.
I like to look around at the cars going by, examine the infrastructure around the intersection like the nerd I am, and when the countdown starts (the crosswalk signals usually have a countdown until they switch to “GO”) I’m looking back and forth between the signal and traffic to see who’s stopping and who’s trying to beat the light.
I’m not about to trust my life to a signal when so many drivers are too busy on their phones to notice the big lights in front of them shining a different color than it did a second ago.
Normally when you need to wait at a crossing because it’s red you take out your phone to waste some time.
Is that considered normal these days? Jesus.
I don’t know where you live, but here in Seoul nobody takes out their phone out at the traffic light because most of the people have it already in the hand while walking.
See this random video I just googled of a crosswalk in Gangnam: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeadHl7ugmk
Yup, everybody looking down at their pocket computers and fucking up their posture.
It seems it’s not just in Asia, random London video shows also half of the people walking with phone in the hand: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTxyohQ8jN0&t=11
( Other commenter commented thesame about Tokyo.l
People really take their phones out to waste time waiting for the lights to change? How long does it take for the lights to change? It’s like, maybe a minute absolute maximum where I’m from – does it take longer where you are?
In my city, some intersections you would wait maybe more than 5 minutes for the light to change if you’re not downtown. Then again, I wasn’t on my phone for this wait. Annoyingly, these pedestrian signals didn’t have any sound when they changed, where downtown did.
Downtown wasn’t so bad, though. You might still wait longer than a minute, but usually not.
Dude people are fucked. When people die in round based online games they instantly go on their phones now until the next round. Even in games that require post death teamwork and comms. I have seen the stop light thing too, even for a 20s stop. Absolutely zero ability to just do nothing for a couple seconds and look up at the real world.
Tokyo is full of meanderthals walking and biking while looking down at their phones. Standing still while waiting for the lights to change is tame.
There’s even a word for it here: aruki-sumaho
Notable sightings so far in 2025:
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A pack of middle school boys all playing a mobile game while walking with their faces in their phones and blocking the sidewalk. Three abreast in marching band formation, maybe 15 of them.
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Salaryman holding a laptop and on a conference call while rushing towards a train station.
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A few face-in-tablet while walking, that always gets a smirk out of me.
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Lady in heels, approaching the upward stairs while watching a video on her phone in landscape mode, arm fully extended and airpods in. Misses a step and eats it, goes full scorpion. I was impressed she managed to hold onto her phone and keep all her teeth, she just missed chomping on a concrete step by a few cm.
Its extremely common here. Enough that I usually have to stop walking on the sidewalk and just wait for them to notice me to look up and move out of the way, you can’t always side step them because they’re frequently not walking straight and they’ll wander across the path anyway, hence the term meanderthals.
(Edited for grammar/spelling/links)
meanderthals
Im stealing this.
please do. I stole the term myself from the japanlife subreddit.
The most dangerous part of living in Tokyo isn’t the typhoons, earthquakes, or tsunamis these days, its the mothers on electric assist e-bikes ‘mama-chari’ mid-afternoon on their way back with the whole family.
Toddler in the front, middle schooler on the back, she has pedal assist and is booking it on the sidewalk while looking at her smartphone because its legally permissible to ride with the pedestrians when you feel unsafe on the streets. The bike lanes here aren’t separated from traffic. And the bike lanes here are de-facto 15-minute loading parking spaces for the massive trucks, drop off points for taxis, and uber eats scooter parking spots. So you either have to merge into traffic due to all the parked vehicles, or ride on the sidewalk.
If you ever come to Toyko, walk on the left and look over your right shoulder so you don’t get run over by a whole family on a modern day chariot.
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In huge cities there are crossings where it definitely could take longer. But for 99% of crossings otherwise, yeah, not that long that you’d need to check your phone. Its the tines we are in I guess.
Finland had a solution for this long before smartphones even existed. Pedestrian traffic lights here play different tones depending on whether it’s red or green, allowing blind or visually impaired people to safely navigate the city.
Yeah, bringing more accessibility is very good even if it is quite annoying if you live nearby I guess.
In Scandinavia the boxes have microphones and listens to the ambient sound and lowered and raises its sound accordingly. Some even detect humans around it so if noone are around they turn barely audible. Really nice design.
Weird. I just pay attention to my surroundings myself.
Those are just as much of your surroundings as regular lights though
Just unnecessarily redundant ones for those of us not so addicted to our phones we can’t last 20 seconds without looking at them.
I know! Maybe they need traffic lights built into phones! As you approach a traffic light, they link up with the intersection and tint your screen green and red depending on the walk/don’t walk status! You’d never have to look up from your phones again!
That’s the idea behind AR glasses.
Don’t let pesky reality get in the way of the ad stream ever againfuck that, GPS is meant to be off except when it helps me
Who said anything about GPS, though? It could easily be those “bluetooth beacons”, right?
You don’t even need to pay special attention, peripheral vision and the changing sound of cars is more than enough of a hint that the light might have changed.
There are a whole lot more threats than cars at crossings that you might like to be aware of.
(And before people straw man this, it’s an example selected for comedy potential, not a comprehensive list of all possible environmental hazards you might want to keep aware of.)
there are risks associated with phones, yes? increased likelihood of becoming a meal is one of them
Yes, that’s where peripheral vision comes into play.
Yes, let’s just ignore almost a century of research on perception and go with that, shall we?
Some “smart” systems extend to car and bicycle users too.
In your country there isn’t a sound for when you can cross?
Sadly no. Actually there is a button sometimes, but I couldn’t figure what it is for. It’s not for blind people because it doesn’t make a sound.
What do the visually impaired do?
It’s a neat idea, but looking down at your phone is probably not a great idea when standing so close to a busy road.
what else is there to do? be bored for a couple minutes?
I dunno, think about something. There must be something worth thinking about in your life. Or is it only cheap, meaningless dopamine you get from staring at your phone?
Yes.
That’s pretty neat. It annoys me here that newer crossings tend not to have the beep, and the lights are on a post on the same side - which would be fine but you can’t always look at the light and the road, so sometimes it goes green and I don’t notice. Having them on the road threshold would make it a bit more obvious I think, even if you’re not on a phone.
I bet it works well for when the sun is in your eyes, too.
Intense sunlight could make it hard to see the lights on the ground, no?
During those rare moments you’re outside, it’s called the “ground.”
In my opinion it wouldn’t work everywhere - I was surprised to see how orderly people were in Seoul when I was there a couple years ago. No matter how crowded, everyone was standing in lines, waiting - even if they were watching Netflix or YouTube in the meantime.
Here, we are actively warned against using phones or headsets when crossing the streets (signs painted on the street), exactly because some drivers watch TikTok and whatnot WHILE driving. I find it sad that here pedestrians have to accommodate careless drivers.
Nevertheless, I like the idea, just hope it won’t be a thing here before we can get things to be a bit more orderly on the streets.
Literally nothing works everywhere.
Fair enough
My city installed it on some crossing, it’s pretty nice looking as well.
I’m glad I seem to be not the only one to be disgusted by the concept. Like, wtf? If you are addicted to the phone so much that for the couple dozen of seconds you wait, a ground light is “helpful” for you, you belong to psychiatry/addictoligy department of your nearest hospital. Jesus fucking christ.
Very elitist of you to know so much about other peoples psyche.
Yes. That’s exactly what “elitism” means. 🙄
