We’re a nation of jaywalkers, not queue jumpers

Visitors to Berlin are quickly charmed by one of the city's most beloved symbols, the Ampelmännchen, those cute little traffic icons that originated in the communist east. But it speaks volumes that even freewheeling Berlin has adopted traffic lights, of all things, as its unofficial logo; it's telling because Germans, notoriously, don't jaywalk.

Pretty much everyone stands stock still until the little man turns green, at which point they move en masse across the road, a walking metaphor for rigid public order. The volume of traffic is just not a factor.

I’m fortunate enough to be a regular visitor to Hamburg, and to these Irish eyes the habit at first appeared plain odd, evidence of an almost ominous level of obedience. But it became clear to me that it is a social norm enforced by subtle, unspoken peer pressure: it isn’t fear of being caught by a rare passing police officer that causes people to wait for the green man but the risk of glaring disapproval. It’s effective enough that I eventually kicked my jaywalking ways.

In many respects Germany exhibits many of the attributes we associate with a smart society: anyone who has lived there for any length of time will rave about the quality of life; the high standards of education and healthcare; low crime rates; vibrant urban areas with an abundance of public amenities; and prosperous economy that mixes big industry and small business.

If we are seriously seeking to improve the areas of perpetual dysfunction in Irish life, we would be wise to examine what the Germans get so right and try to emulate it.

In a sense, it is the acceptance and observance of widely agreed social norms that ultimately underpin that exceptional quality of life. One of those norms is the notion that walking out in front of traffic is harmful to the collective good. Here, on the other hand, we march across the road based on nothing more than a hasty mental calculation about the velocity and distance of oncoming traffic. Hey, it’s who we are – we can’t be controlled by mere traffic lights!

But, likewise, our social norms don’t extend so far as actually expecting things to work, or even really demanding that people do their jobs properly. You can introduce all the strategies and systems in the world, but so long as a society exhibits a remarkably high tolerance for things being perennially half-assed, sustainable improvement will be hard to achieve.

Atrocious queuers
But there's a problem in this all-too convenient jaywalking-inspired theory: Germans are atrocious queuers. The image of a nation of respectful rule-followers is warranted, but they are surprisingly prone to skip lines or even barge other, more patient queuers out of the way.

Why the contrast between road-crossing and line-waiting? The two situations are not so dissimilar, after all. Both hinge on similar sorts of peer- enforced social norms; after all, if you’re so conscious of your fellow citizen’s disapproval that you’re willing to stand by the side of a road in the complete absence of any traffic, you’d think you’d also be unwilling to risk their disapproval by jumping ahead in a shared queuing process.

Here I’ll admit to having wasted an inordinate amount of time contemplating this apparent social paradox. What can it say about Germany, I wonder, that the mere presence of pedestrian traffic lights is enough to enforce rigid order on people’s behaviour?

Quasi-authority figures
Do the Ampelmännchen function as quasi-authority figures, I wonder, illuminated substitutes for the state, issuing green and red commands that must be obeyed? And in the absence of such an authority figure, what does it say that some Germans are content to break pretty sensible social norms, such as waiting your turn in line?

But then it hit me that we are faced with a mirror image of that very social conundrum right here in Ireland. For all our jaywalking prowess, we are among the world's great queuers, usually respectful of one another's place in the line, accepting of the self-regulating order that queues impose, and driven to rage if people dare to break that social compact by skipping ahead.

Again, this is fine fodder for the pop-anthropologist in all of us; certainly, it bolsters the view that Irish people are social creatures with a natural trust of our fellow citizens, while simultaneously boasting a brazen disregard for authority and the rules it imposes on us.

Of course, the nature of our respective national characters can’t be gleaned from examining how we cross the road or wait in line. But somewhere between the two lies a larger truth about our strengths and weaknesses that we will need to tease out in any process of social renewal.

Shane Hegarty is on leave