Value of Life and Crossing Roads

When we travel in Europe, we've noticed there is a certain culture and specifics of how pedestrians cross the roads using the Zebra-crosses.

In some regions, there are only two types of road-crossers:

• The running type - all ages of people trying to cross as fast as possible.
• The slow demonstrative type - they walk on the Zebra as slow as possible, because, well, they have already occupied that territory.

Have you observed this too?

You probably have, if you've driven your car in the countries of Eastern Europe - Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia, some parts of the Western Balkans and some Southern parts of Italy and France.

Something else, that's quite typical there - people prefer to stop at the edge of the Zebra and wait for the cars to pass before stepping on. Some drivers even accelerate to clearly demonstrate they will not stop. How rude!

Believe it or not sometimes there is a chance you get cursed by elderly people if you decide to wait for them to cross as the law demands actually. This really happened to me more than twice!

You will most probably never see that same behavior when people cross the roads in the central and Northwestern parts of Europe like the countries of Benelux, Sweden, Finland, Norway, etc...

So what's the common for all those "unnormal" crossing types?

Is it their culture of not respecting each other enough?

Is it the fact that there isn't enough traffic police? Or it could generally be bribed there?

Is it simply because the value of life there is less that the value in the well developed countries?

Of course, this could only be our own opinion, but we see the correlation.