The Little Green People of the World

What pedestrian signals reveal about the cities around them.

A hat. A walking stick. A ponytail. Two people holding hands.

Put enough pedestrian signals next to one another and the familiar figure starts to look surprisingly unfamiliar. Some stride forward with enormous confidence. Others seem to be assembled from a handful of dots. In New York, the person telling you to cross is white. In Berlin, the green one wears a hat.

I came across a collection of these figures and kept looking. I knew they varied, but I had never really considered how many decisions could fit inside something so small.

Someone had to choose the shape of the head, the angle of the arms, the length of the step. Someone decided what a person should look like when reduced to a few points of light.

A collection hiding in plain sight

The collection that caught my attention was Maya Barkai’s Walking Men Worldwide, a public art project built from photographs of pedestrian signals contributed by photographers around the world.

Its first public installation, Walking Men 99, opened at 99 Church Street in Lower Manhattan in January 2010. Ninety-nine figures from different cities appeared at human scale around a construction site. Later installations brought the project to places including Perm, Sydney, Buenos Aires, and Taipei.

Enlarging them changes the encounter. A figure normally small enough to overlook becomes someone you can stand beside. Putting the figures together makes their differences much easier to see.

Barkai’s collection gives a name and a location to things most of us process almost automatically. It turns a familiar instruction into a reason to look again.

The photographs below are a separate selection from public archives. They follow the curiosity her project opened up for me: what happens when you pay attention to the person inside the light?

Berlin: the one with the hat

Berlin’s Ampelmännchen is easy to recognise. The hat, the rounded body, the outstretched arms of the red figure, the determined stride of the green one: there is a lot of character in very little space.

Traffic psychologist Karl Peglau submitted his designs in 1961. After years of development and testing, the signals first appeared in East Berlin in 1969, according to the German Historical Institute’s account.

The broad silhouette had a practical purpose. As the history published by AMPELMANN explains, a larger illuminated area made the figure more visible. The red person’s arms form a barrier; the green person’s legs establish a direction. Anneliese Wegner, Peglau’s secretary, helped turn his sketches into the detailed figures, including their distinctive hats.

After German reunification, the East German signals faced replacement. A campaign to preserve them helped secure their survival. The figure eventually crossed into the western part of Berlin too.

What began as a safety device became something people wanted to keep because it belonged to their experience of the city. A small, everyday object had acquired enough meaning to be defended.

That is quite a career for a traffic light.

Odense: a writer crosses the street

In Odense, some pedestrian signals have a more specific identity: Hans Christian Andersen.

The author appears with a top hat and walking stick. When the light is red, he waits, leaning on the stick. When it turns green, he steps forward.

Lars Bjørnsten’s photographs and account document the designs introduced for the celebration of Andersen’s 200th birthday. The Fubon Art Foundation’s description of Barkai’s Taipei installation also identifies the Odense figure as the writer.

I like how ordinary the setting is. You could encounter Andersen on the way to buy groceries, wait beside him for a few seconds, and carry on.

A person usually remembered through books, museums, and monuments gets a small recurring role in the daily life of his hometown. Recognising him adds another layer to an instruction you already understand.

Wellington: who gets to represent everyone?

The phrase “walking man” sounds unremarkable until you begin noticing the alternatives.

In 2014, pedestrian lights near Parliament in Wellington were fitted with the silhouette of Kate Sheppard, as recorded by Heritage New Zealand. Her long skirt gives the figure a very different outline from the usual anonymous pedestrian.

Sheppard was a leading organiser of the campaign that helped win women the vote in New Zealand in 1893. NZHistory describes the years of campaigning and petitions behind that achievement.

Placed near Parliament, her image makes the location part of the meaning. Someone who worked to expand political participation now appears in an everyday signal outside the institutions that participation concerns.

There is a useful question inside this: when a public symbol stands for everyone, whose outline do we instinctively give it?

Amersfoort offers another answer with Sofie, its female pedestrian figure. The municipality includes her among the city’s symbols, alongside its flag and coat of arms, and describes her role in guiding people from the station towards the centre. Give a familiar figure a name, and it can start to feel like a neighbour.

Vienna: room for two

Vienna’s contribution is particularly lovely: couples.

Some of its pedestrian lights show two women, two men, or a woman and a man. The figures appear together, with a small heart worked into the design.

The City of Vienna dates their introduction to May 2015, ahead of the Life Ball and Eurovision Song Contest. It explicitly describes the different couples as a way to reflect the diversity of the city’s population.

There is something appealing about making that statement in a place everyone uses. A crossing light addresses the person waiting on the pavement, whoever they happen to be. Here, its little picture also makes more than one kind of relationship visible.

The idea travelled. In June 2016, London introduced special pedestrian signals around Trafalgar Square for Pride, including holding-hands designs and gender symbols. London City Hall’s announcement directly credits Vienna as an inspiration.

Two cities, linked by a small change in the picture that lights up when it is time to cross.

Taipei: when the picture moves

In Taiwan, the familiar figure acquired another dimension: animation.

Taipei’s Department of Transportation places the debut of its animated “little green man” at the junction of Songzhi Road and Songshou Road on March 18, 1999. The design combined a moving figure with a countdown timer.

The speeding-up animation became a memorable part of the design. It also exposed a problem: a running figure could be read as encouragement to rush.

In May 2026, Taichung’s city government explained a change to Taiwan’s signal rules that removes the accelerating animation. Its account specifically discusses children, older people, and people with limited mobility, and the risk of prompting pedestrians to hurry. The archival photographs here show earlier installations.

That is a revealing design lesson. Giving a symbol personality also gives it a tone of voice. Its posture and movement can communicate something beyond the intended instruction. Those choices deserve attention precisely because people read them so quickly.

A different way of looking at a city

It would be easy to turn this collection into a set of national personality tests. A long stride must mean one thing; a hat must mean another.

The stories are more interesting when you follow the evidence. Berlin’s silhouette involves visibility, a psychologist, an illustrator, and a preservation campaign. Wellington’s recalls a political achievement. Vienna’s couples were a deliberate statement about representation. Taipei’s animation brings us back to how people interpret movement.

There are also quieter differences in the photographs: the spacing of the dots, the size of the body, the way a hand replaces a standing figure in New York. Some invite a historical explanation. Others simply reward a closer look.

I like collections that send you back into the world with something new to notice. Barkai’s does that with an object that was already sitting at eye level, waiting for us at the corner.

The next time I stop at a crossing, I will probably spend a few seconds looking at the figure itself. Whether it has a hat. How far it is stepping. Whether it has company.

Then the light will change, and we will both get on with our day.

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Inspired by Maya Barkai’s Walking Men Worldwide. The independently sourced photographs in this article are credited individually and are not presented as contributions to her project. Images have been resized for display; their source pages and individual licences are linked in the captions.