life - Crossing the road

Here you see the traffic lights at a crossing at Zhongshan Nanerlu close to Shanghai Stadium. I have used this situation a few times to explain life in China. The picture has been taken at a fairly quiet moment, so you can see the figures in the traffic lights.
The cross road is already a pretty complicated one with major traffic streams and an entrance of the elevated highway. Apart from traffic lights we mostly have (they have not yet returned to duty today) a host of traffic assistants with uniforms and whistles. They tell us when we can walk safely in their eyes. That is mostly when our light is still red, but when the light for the pedestrians turns green, the car traffic becomes so dense, you really have to step in front of the cars to force them to stop.
Mostly there are also police officers, but they seem to concentrate mostly on truck drivers and ignore the rest of the mayhem.
We now have also these numbers included in the traffic lights that normally would indicate how many seconds you have till the light becomes green (the green numbers) or red (the red numbers). While the yellow numbers at the traffic lights for pedestrians work fairly accurate, the other numbers seem more part of a lottery: they can count up, down and sometimes there seems no order at all.
What can we now learn from this crossing about China? It shows that more regulations and more government interference does not always help or make even a change. It is better to use your eyes and try to cross with a crowd of people.