If you were zooming down a familiar street and suddenly saw a bunch of concrete steps floating in the street in front of you, would you hit the brakes? The strange sight would likely be enough to slow you down a bit, especially as your ‘driving brain’ perceives an obstacle and instinctively reacts. Officials in the small Icelandic fishing town of Ísafjörður are counting on it with their first 3D crosswalk, intended to reduce drivers’ speeds on the narrow street.

They've painted this 3D effect zebra crossing in Iceland to slow traffic and it seems to be working pic.twitter.com/G14fHSlNUc

— Chris Choi (@Chrisitv) October 20, 2017

When you’re approaching the optical illusion crosswalk, your brain perceives it as a 3D object well before you actually cross it, preventing panicked brake-slamming. The illusion is only effective from one direction, though (and when looking at it from above.)

Inspired by similar projects instituted in Russia, China and India, the crosswalk by road painting company Vegmálun GÍH is fully permitted, and street painters had to practice 3D painting a lot before they put it in place. These ‘optical speed bumps’ not only encourage drivers to slow down (in theory), but also call attention to pedestrian crossing points, potentially making them a little safer.

So, do illusions like these actually work? That’s debatable. In cities like Beijing, where traffic tends to be a chaotic free-for-all, officials say they’re helping, and that at the very least, they can keep pedestrians visually occupied until the light changes so they don’t jaywalk. Critics of the technique say local drivers will disregard the effect after the first time, which may be true, but at least it’ll garner a reaction from visitors.

Part art project and part urban safety experiment, this series of Funnycross installations in Madrid have been positioned outside a cross section of city schools.

Designed by Bulgarian artist Christo Guelov (images by Rafael Perez Martinez, the creative crossings weave diamonds, circles and other shapes into the visual language of existing horizontal wide lines.

The brightly-colored interventions are designed to enliven the streets beyond conventional sign-posting while their eye-catching patterns are aimed at making the crossing points more visible.

The artist also aims to raise larger questions about the role of color in cities, where infrastructure is often monochromatic, systematic and ultimately dull.

“Opening up new horizons for human experience has always been the main source of creative energy, both in science and in art,” says guelov. “To inquire into something apparently non-existent or invisible to others and to provide it with real presence has always been the natural mechanism to generate usefulness for art objects.”

When visitors approach the intersection in front of Seattle’s famous Pike Place Market in the heart of downtown, the surprise is palpable when they realize that a ‘go’ for pedestrians lets people walk any way they want. Los Angeles recently followed suit, introducing its own omnidirectional ‘scramble intersection’ at a notoriously dangerous crossroads, making it much safer.

At Hollywood and Highland, designers have taken things a step further, adding an X-shaped layer of walking indicators (zebra stripes and white-framed boxes) to make it clear how people are permitted (and encouraged) to cross the streets diagonally through the center.

Popularized in the 1950s by Henry Barnes, the concept is quite simple: when pedestrians get their green light, anyone can cross anywhere during the limited window, then the lanes are given back over to cars and the process repeats. In the months since this latest scrambler was introduced, there has been only a single accident.

Scramble intersections can be found around the world, but are still limited in quantity, focused in areas where the safety gains are greatest. In dense cities like Tokyo, Japan, they can be marvelously busy at times (as shown above). In Seattle, meanwhile, the success of the Pike Street and First Avenue scrambler has led to others being introduced around the city; perhaps LA will continue to follow its lead.

Sixteen crosswalks at four intersections in Baltimore are the subject of a street-spanning public art project that re-imagines white-on-black zebra striping, each with a unique twist.

Sponsored by the  Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts, the first two of the series are already complete with two more yet to come.

Artist Paul Bertholet is behind the giant zip-up crosswalk while Graham Coreil-Allen designed the hopscotch-styled variant (additional images below by Graham Coreil-Allen).

One goal of this set of projects is to add a creative touch around the city’s Westside Arts and Entertainment District, attracting visitors and interaction while helping define the neighborhood.

There is a lot of commercial emphasis on the safety of vehicle designs, but did you know that 25% of auto accidents involve pedestrians? While the purpose of these crossings is to assist people (or in some cases animals) wishing to cross a road, their utilitarianism hasn’t not stopped people from creative experimentation in the form of quite literal pedestrian street art.

The most famous of these works come, unsurprisingly, from Peter Gibson, often referred to as Canada’s answer to Britain’s Banksy. Gibson’s stencils are a direct response to the proliferation of ‘car culture‘ and though have gotten him into trouble with the law (he was arrested and charged with 53 counts of mischief) have gotten almost universal praise from the public for questioning the impact of our dependency on automobiles on society. Ironically enough, all charges were dropped against Gibson, instead he was asked to participate in 40 hours of community service focusing on street art.

While a majority of our efforts towards reducing automotive deaths tend to focus on passenger safety, they overlook the startling fact that about 25% of all automotive-accident victims are pedestrians. To spread awareness of this fact as part of Portugal’s ‘Safe Street Week’, Draft FCB Lisbon was commissioned to create a zebra crossing memorial where the stripes consisted of names of pedestrians killed by cars. The result is a spine-chilling visualization of pedestrian deaths that may ultimately be self-defeating as it distracts people trying to cross the street.

Sentieri Urbani is a project by two brothers, Davide and Gabriele Adriano, that aims to reinvent zebra crossings to communicate the distinct identities of cities where display their works. Their goal is to make each zebra crossing individually recognizable and actually allow pedestrians who take the time to “read more information and learn the place they’re visiting”. At the same time, the designs are created in such a way that they don’t present any distraction or hazard to cars driving faster than walking speed since they just see a traditional crossing. In fact, these works help drivers because they are created in a way that increases the friction between the car and the road, giving them more control and making the roads safer.

Finally, like many other previously ‘underground’ art forms, zebra crossing street art is being used for guerrilla marketing. In an attempt to battle ad-blindness that consumers are fast developing, MTN Company recently used zebra crossing art to advertise an architecture and design event.