An environment designed for car drivers

From the 'Designing Streets for People' list, a statistical note by Alasdair Massie referring to a crossing that he uses regularly:

If approaching “as traffic” on the road you generally have a green light – 87% of the time in fact. If you are unfortunate enough to hit a red, then you have at worst a 16 second wait before you can proceed. As with pretty much every junction / crossing except for large signalised roundabouts, you clear the crossing in one go.

If on the other hand, you approach the same crossing as a pedestrian, you almost ALWAYS meet a red light. At most, if there are people pressing the call button continuously, only 5% of the phase shows green to pedestrians. You then have to WAIT. Assuming that nobody has pressed the button before you, then that wait will be 40 seconds if there is traffic (which there is for most of the day). You then get 6 seconds of green time. Then, having got to the sheep pen in the middle of the road and struggled your way through the phalanx of people coming the other way, you have to go through the whole process again, admittedly with a shorter wait.