If you "jaywalk" within 20 metres of an intersection you can be fined. This is fairly common if police are doing a blitz - I've seen it happen near universities and high schools.
Interesting. I was reading a HN comment last month about how Australians are 'disgustingly... devoted to following tiny guidelines' [1], so it's interesting to hear this aspect of freedom. I'm generally not inclined to believe that Australians manage for themselves, given the previous comment was first and takes precedence.
My Australian kids and 9 and 11 and we are very strict about waiting for the walk signal. Kids that age tend to walk around daydreaming, and just not great at working out how fast cars are moving. Crossing a busy road is literally the most dangerous thing they do.
Another cultural observation, when living in Boston, my partner and I both found it strange that if you were standing on the side of the road, cars will stop and wait for you to cross, even if you were nowhere near a crossing or intersection. Cars seems to give way to pedestrians anywhere an everywhere.
In Australia, cars wont stop for you unless you are at a crossing, and even then you need to make sure they have seen you. Cars zooming through a green light are not going to be looking for pedestrians walking against a red walk signal. The onus is on the pedestrian to not be hit, not the car to avoid the pedestrian.
Update: Also.. its hard not to take this persons criticism personally, so when they say "the UK / Australia model where everyone obeys some stupid rule written on the wall over their own intelligence" I would just like to respond that is a combination of wanting to be polite and courteous to the sign poster, and intelligent enough to know we don't know everything, that the sign might be for our own safety. :)
Massachusetts in general has that cultural quirk and raising children there it actually concerned me. If they were trained to think that cars would stop for them and went to pretty much anywhere else, they'd be flattened. I remember just standing on the sidewalk one time, probably close to the curb, and a car came to a stop behind me to patiently wait. It seemed odd, and socially the fact that I wasn't interested in crossing seemed like they might take disrespect from it. But it was their assumption about me.
You can always have cautious children become more adventurous later, but it's unlikely to ever go the reverse direction.
This is how traffic should be, everyone should communicate clearly and give way to pedestrians, including bicycles, Amsterdam cyclists are horrible at this. About your fear the fix is to tell your kids to look for that communication as well.
My breakfast view is a school crosswalk and all children wait for cars and cyclists, most even wait for a complete stop before crossing (N=100).
Having many tiny inconsequential rules allows you many daily transgressions. It helps you to keep the self delusion that you too are just a little Aussie larikin, and assuage your guilt when you call the cops on that neighbour stealing from your hard rubbish collection.. cos that cunt just took it too far.
I find the branding of 'nanny state' really odd. And I can't really think of much you can't do here outside of fireworks and guns, and even then just go to a rural area. Maybe it's just me, I guess there's a lot of laws, but we also have a lot of government services and a stable functioning democracy as a consequence of following those laws.
Like it's rare for kids to die at school here. They don't get shot. So that's something.
