Last Saturday afternoon in Dublin, the Anarchist Workers Solidarity Movement seized the time to "reclaim the streets" by blocking traffic between Nassau Street and Suffolk Street, and dozens of ordinary people joined them before gardai moved in to clear the way.
This brief demonstration reflected the frustration felt by pedestrians over their lot. Forced to wait for ages at junctions until the "green man" comes on (ever so briefly), it's hardly surprising that so many of them resort to jaywalking even on the busiest streets of the city.
For anyone with a baby-buggy, guide dog or wheelchair, the centre of Dublin is an obstacle course. All the arrangements seem designed to facilitate vehicles; at College Street, for example, pedestrians still get just eight seconds to cross compared to 96 seconds for traffic.
Footpaths are littered with poles, signs and other obstructions, and they have been dug up so often that the surfaces are often uneven. In places pedestrians are even corralled behind sheep-pen railings to tame their jaywalking instincts. Everywhere traffic has priority.
"There has been a fairly token regard for the interests of pedestrians," admits Mr Owen Keegan, Dublin Corporation's director of traffic. "Yet at any hour of the day or night, there are significantly more pedestrians on the streets than there are vehicle occupants."
Over the years the needs of pedestrians tended to be neglected by the authorities in the interest of keeping traffic moving. But now, since the road network has become so congested that the traffic hardly moves at all, the last remaining excuse for not improving their lot is gone.
"More and more I'm inclined to identify people whose lot we can improve, and there is tremendous potential for enhanced pedestrian facilities, especially in the city centre," Mr Keegan says. "The only reason this hasn't happened yet is concentration on bus corridors.
"We're looking at every significant pedestrian route and every junction within the canals to see where we can put in pedestrian phases, and we will do that systematically across the inner city. It's going to be a massive programme, involving up to 300 sets of lights," he says.
"We're also looking at the calibration of signals to reduce the average waiting period for pedestrians to 25 seconds. That's already been done at the Ha'penny Bridge and the Millennium Bridge, where there are two pedestrian phases in each 120-second cycle even in peak hours.
"We're extending `green man' time so you no longer need to be Linford Christie to make it across a traffic junction. And from September we're introducing a `world first', electronic counters at pedestrian crossings to indicate the remaining waiting time in seconds."
There are also going to be a lot more pelican crossings with flashing amber signals, extended running of pedestrian lights on green rather than green followed by amber, and a programme to monitor pedestrian transit times and, hopefully, improve their "behaviour patterns".
New technology is playing an important role. "One of the advantages of SCATS [the corporation's computerised traffic control system] is that it allows us to do things in smarter ways," Mr Keegan says. "We also know what we want to do and, for once, we have plenty of money."
As he sees it "if we provide better facilities and reduce waiting times, jaywalking will be less of a problem". Footpaths are also being widened, as in South William Street and St Andrew Street, as part of what he describes as "gold-plated inner-city traffic-calming".
The director of traffic also favours the idea put forward some time ago by the Irish Heart Foundation to erect signs throughout the city indicating walking times from any given point to St Stephen's Green, for example, to encourage people to use their own two feet.
All that's holding this up is a review of signage generally, which Mr Keegan describes as "a shambles". As for the need for an Irish equivalent of the Pedestrians Association in Britain, he says pedestrians here "don't need a lobby group because we're doing it".