The Summer of Love & Crosswalks

In a world obsessed with digital disruption and billion-dollar innovation, it’s easy to overlook the quiet brilliance of something as simple as a painted crosswalk.

White stripes. Black asphalt.

No sensors. No software…(for now).

Just paint and placement.

The humble crosswalk is design turned safety.

It works. And it’s worked for over 70 years.

Saving lives, guiding traffic, and, in the Summer of 1969, becoming iconic.

So I have to ask, where did it come from?

Crosswalks go back centuries

In ancient Rome, large stepping-stones were placed across busy roads allowing pedestrians avoid water, mud, and, you know, worse.

Chariots would bump over, or around them, and people could cross without getting their tunics soaked.

If you’ve been to Pompeii, you’ve seen those same stones, they’re called pondera, and are strategically placed at intersections and along major streets. 

These were the world's first crosswalks.

But that’s a far cry from the sharp white stripes we know today.

The painted crosswalk, as a formal safety measure, didn’t arrive until the early 20th century as a direct response to the rise of the automobile and then followed by new, harsh, laws on pedestrian freedoms.

The first painted crosswalk is reported to have been on Manhattan in 1911.  It featured two-parallel lines designating where people should walk.  Great for order, but still hard to see, so these crosswalks didn’t provide much in terms of safety.

In fact, by 1924, auto accidents were responsible for 23,600 deaths and 700,000 injuries annually in the US. Horrific accounts filled newspapers, describing out-of-control cars plowing into crowds of people waiting for streetcars, scattering them "like ninepins".

Jaywalking

Los Angeles created the first legal zone to cross a street.  That’s because LA was the first city to criminalize a form of walking, otherwise known as jaywalking.

“Jay” was an early 20th-century slang for a rustic, ignorant person from the countryside.

But the term first shows up as “jay-driving”.  Meaning it was the drivers who were the rubes. 

The auto industry, quite impressively, turned this phrase on its head, pointing out that careless “jays” were “walking” onto the street and into oncoming traffic. 

Through relentless promotion in newspapers and public safety campaigns, the auto lobby successfully created and popularized the image of the "jaywalker" as a foolish, irresponsible, and a modern-day nuisance.

Enter the Zebra

As cars got faster, cities got busier and fatalities increased. Governments realized that people and vehicles needed clearer rules of engagement.

By the 1930s, cities in both the U.S. and U.K. were experimenting with ways to organize pedestrian movement.

But visibility remained an issue. Headlights weren’t great.  Streetlights were nonexistent.

Drivers couldn’t always see these markings in time to stop.

In post–World War II Britain, the Ministry of Transport, and the Road Research Laboratory, began testing new designs for pedestrian crossings. T

hey laid down different shapes and colors in various cities, studied driver behavior (or is it behaviour?), and eventually found that alternating black and white stripes had the best visibility and psychological impact.

The Zebra Crossing was born.

Stripes suggested order, rhythm, a kind of visual boundary that made drivers instinctively slow down.

The first official zebra crossing was painted in Slough, England, on Halloween, 1951. Within a year, over 1,000 similar crossings appeared across the U.K. Pedestrian fatalities dropped.

The experiment had worked.

The rest of the world took note. Zebra-style crossings spread across Europe, Asia, and eventually North America.   

The U.S. adopted its own approach, usually involving two thick white lines or more stylized “ladder” patterns.

But the principle was the same: use high-contrast paint to carve out a pedestrian safe zone.

In fact, it looked so cool, it became famous.

Abbey Road: The Most Famous Crosswalk

The Beatles were finishing their final album together in August 1969.  It was a project that had gone through multiple working titles.

 “Everest” was one.

 “Four in the Bar” was another.

But after a long and winding, and sometimes fractious studio run, the band was ready to be done. They had stopped touring, so this recording would be it.  (If you’ve seen the Peter Jackson documentary, you know the end was near).

Paul McCartney suggested they name the album after the studio where the recordings were taking place, EMI Studios on Abbey Road. Instead of designing a cover, why not just walk outside and take a picture in the street?

He admitted the shoot came from a moment of relaxed spontaneity, as “largely dictated by laziness”, and was a deliberately low-effort alternative to more elaborate album art

A police officer held off traffic.  The photographer was given ten minutes and a stepladder.  

The shoot had to be quick.

The Beatles walked back and forth across the zebra crossing and a half-dozen shots were snapped.

On the fifth attempt, they hit it: mid-stride, in sync, looking like a band and a break-up all at once.

No band name. No album title. Just four guys crossing a street to head their separate ways.

The image became legendary. Today, it’s possibly the most recognized photos in all of music history.  It’s been imitated, parodied, studied, and obsessed over.

It also turned that one crosswalk into a global tourist attraction. People fly to London just to recreate it.

“I’m Walkin’ Here!”

That same year, in the US, another crosswalk was getting its cinematic moment.

In Midnight Cowboy, Dustin Hoffman plays Ratso Rizzo, a fast-talking street hustler navigating New York’s chaotic sidewalks. During the scene, he and Jon Voight’s character cross a Manhattan street.   

A cab - which was not supposed to be there -  jumps the light and nearly hits Hoffman.

Instead of breaking character or restarting the take, Hoffman improvised one of the most famous lines in movie history:

“I’m walkin’ here!”

It wasn’t in the script. The cab wasn’t part of the shoot!

It was a genuine near miss captured in real time. Hoffman, fully in character, slapped the hood and barked the line with perfect New York timing.

Hoffman then prolongs the improvisation, flips off the cab, and continues to talk about pedestrian / car insurance scams.

That moment was raw, unscripted, and real. (Jon Voight’s recollection of that moment is worth watching here).

It resonated because it captured the tension of a city where pedestrians are constantly staking their claim on tiny slices of pavement and paint.

A reminder that a crosswalk doesn’t guarantee safety.

It’s a confrontation if you don’t look both ways.

The Takeaway

Like almost everything in life, tomorrow’s crosswalks will look different.

If you’ve had the chance to ride in a Waymo, you’ve seen how the vehicle approaches a crosswalk filled with people. 

Slowly.

Waymo’s system allows it to “see” the road, the light, people, and the crosswalk.  And it lets riders follow along on screen.

It shows us what it sees.

A.I. enabled tech is all around us, and will be coming to the crosswalk soon.

As municipalities build up their systems, we will see crosswalks light up on demand, change colors to better communicate with drivers, draw lasers to highlight the zone, and overall increase pedestrian safety.

But for now, a crosswalk is a piece of road and more.

A legal boundary.

And a cultural symbol.

It’s the setting for music legends, movie quotes, street art, protest marches, and everyday routines. It’s one of the rare places where infrastructure meets safety, order, and design.

We obey the crosswalk instinctively, whether we’re in Liverpool or Manhattan.

We pause at the white stripes. We let people pass. We wave our hand, or a piece-out sign, in thanks.

It’s one of the few traffic features that feels democratic and orderly.

A painted promise that, for a few seconds, the street belongs to the people.

It’s a little paint that goes a long way.

Stay in touch 

If you enjoyed this piece, please reach out, I’d love to hear from you. You can contact me at [email protected] or LinkedIn. 

Stay safe out there!