We have quite a few zebra crossings here. To be honest, you'd probably need to be helping a zebra to cross to get drivers to notice them. Surprisingly, even on the steppes of Greater Croydonia, actual zebras are impractical to get a hold of. It's not so bad when there is dense traffic, but outside of those times, vehicles get to speed up and the little thought that goes through most drivers' brains seems to be 'why stop, there's no one behind me, they can cross then.' Of course, they never check there's anyone behind them. You also get the convoys, were all the following vehicles are so intent on the car in front they don't even notice the crossings. Mostly, it's a case of fixing the approaching drivers with a steely stare and stepping out like you mean it. Carrying a rocket launcher or large calibre automatic weapon would probably help. More prosaically, you do need your wits about you, especially when the traffic can get up 40 mph. There's been one death recently, and a seriously injured child, which says something about the traffic on that road.
There's another zebra crossing down by the station. That's not nice either, mostly because drivers can't manage both a junction and a crossing. The neural input is too much and their brains parboil in their own cerebro-spinal fluid, which means they drive even worse that usual, which might have previously seemed impossible.
They ought to be safe and perfect for the situation, but in practice, the standard of driving and level of respect for pedestrians isn't there. I imagine at some point the burghers of Croydonia will replace them with light-controlled crossings, which are The Worst Way to Manage a Road Crossing Ever. I do wonder if the people behind those things ever cross a road. Perhaps they have special portable tunnels or bridges they carry around with them, so don't have to bother with their creations. They simply have some kind of quantum wormhole device. Why did the traffic engineer cross the road? Because the relevant probability function said he had.
There's a wonderful one in Peckham High Street that combines one of those eye-level indicators (useful in a crowd, I'm sure) with a wait time measured in geological era. Peckham is not exactly known for its law abiding ways (the police pulled out in 2006 and it's now a UN mandate, probably) so impatience wins out and people end up facing-off traffic. Then, like they've watched first penguin to jump into a sea that might have hidden a hungry killer whale, everyone else streams out. Power to the people. So the light is green, the crossing indicator is red, but the cars are stuck anyway. Of course, once the pedestrians have crossed, the light turns red and the cars are stuck at an empty crossing. Rinse and repeat. I tried to think of a worse way to manage a road crossing, but short of flooding the road and adding actual killer whales, I couldn't.
