THE MAN AND THE HAND.(The Talk of the Town)(change to pedestrian signals in New York, New York)

On the one hand, pedestrians ought to be impressed by the uncharacteristic stealth with which city workers have changed most of New York's Walk/Don't Walk signals. On the other, they should be concerned; if such a radical transformation can go more or less unobserved, we may be even more vulnerable to, say, a terrorist attack than previously imagined. Picture the city trying to repaint every taxi in town U.N. blue--people wouldn't stand for it! But, if you'll notice, pedestrians, for whatever reason, have kept on obeying and disobeying the crosswalk commands, with the usual resignation and disdain, as though the new signs weren't, in fact, completely foreign and strange.

The old Walk/Don't Walk signs, which have been around for half a century, are being replaced with new signs that feature the federal (and very international-looking) symbols for walking and not-supposed-to-be-walking: a white figure in mid-stride (Walk) and a large orange hand in mid-halt! (Don't Walk). The city is changing all eighty-five-thousand signs, at a cost of $28.2 million. The job started in 2000, in Queens; by February the Zurichification of our street corners should be complete. The old signs still survive in some Manhattan neighborhoods, but, like redwood forests and watermelons with seeds, they are vanishing fast, and once you're aware that they're doomed, the preemptive nostalgia takes hold, and they become as pleasing to the eye as lobster boats.

The idea is that the new ones, which rely on dozens of light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, will last six times longer than the old ones, which relied on two bulbs, and will save two million dollars a year in maintenance and electricity costs. They are also much brighter, and friendlier to immigrants and tourists--you don't have to read English, or read at all, to understand them.

So New York has found another way to look more like Little Rock, Los Angeles, Denver, and New Orleans, which are among the many cities that have adopted the LED signs. This is the way the federal government likes it, apparently. Section 4E.02 of the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, published in 2000 by the Department of Transportation and the Federal Highway Administration, sets forth the following specifications, among many others, for an acceptable "pedestrian signal indication":

A. A steady walking person (symbolizing walk) signal indication ...