Interesting innovations

Innovation is not always radical – and sometimes only “new” for a particular location. I was just now in Kiev for a workshop with an integrated urban planning project and saw a couple of changes since my last visit two years back. The most striking was making the whole of the traffic light green (or orange, red). It may not look much, but no driver can claim not to have noticed the colour of the lights! In addition (less visible from the picture, but also more widespread than these traffic lights, which I only saw on one main axis) were the pedestrian lights built into the pavement: they change according to whether you can cross the road or not, and certainly created (in me) a psychology that you do not want to “step over the threshold” when it is red. I was also quite pretty to see the colour shining through a (thin) layer of snow! In any case great to have been with the participants and take the air locally (from conversations left and right, mostly a frustration with years of Russian threats, but no sense of panic).