Did You Know? Taiwan’s Little Green Man Started Walking in 1999

Cross a street anywhere in Taiwan and you will meet him: a small green figure on the pedestrian signal, walking. Watch a few seconds longer and you notice the thing that makes him famous — as the countdown falls, he speeds up. By the final seconds he is flat-out sprinting.

That is not a glitch in the display. It is the design. The Taiwan little green man — 小綠人 (xiǎo lǜ rén) — was a world first, and he is younger than a lot of people assume.

Born at one Taipei intersection in 1999

He switched on for the first time on March 18, 1999, at the junction of Songzhi Road and Songshou Road in Taipei’s Xinyi District — a few minutes’ walk from where Taipei 101 now stands. Taipei City’s Department of Transportation developed him with the Chinese Signal Company and other partners, and by the city’s own account it was the world’s first traffic signal to put a countdown timer and an animated walking figure on the same display. Taipei later installed an explanatory board at that corner marking it as the little green man’s birthplace, which makes it the most low-key landmark in a district otherwise built entirely of glass towers and shopping malls.

Seven poses and a trick of the eye

The animation is simpler than it looks. He is built from seven differently posed figures, cycled fast enough that persistence of vision fills in the movement — the same principle as a flip-book. The hard part, back in 1998, was the hardware: LED displays were young, and getting the figure to animate while the digits counted down on the same panel reportedly took over a year of research and programming before anything went up on a pole.

He runs because you should too

The pacing is deliberate. When the light first turns, he strolls. As the seconds drain away he picks up his feet, and in roughly the last ten seconds he is running. It is instruction without language: you can read how much time you have from the far side of the road, without squinting at a number, in any language you happen to read. When the time is up he is replaced by the standing 小紅人 (little red man), who never moves at all.

From one corner to most of the world

He spread across Taiwan first — Taipei, New Taipei, Taoyuan, Hsinchu, Taichung, Tainan, Kaohsiung — and then well past it, with versions of the animated countdown signal turning up in the United States, Germany, Japan and China. Google gave him a Doodle on March 18, 2016, for his 17th birthday. And because this is Taiwan, the format got played with: in 2017 Pingtung County installed a couple’s edition, where the red light shows a marriage proposal and the green light shows the pair walking on with a baby stroller.

The takeaway: next time you are waiting at a crossing in Taipei, ignore the number and watch his legs. The signal is telling you how much time you have twice over, and one of those two ways is a 27-year-old piece of Taiwanese design that the rest of the world copied. Add it to the list of things to actually look at while you are in the city.

We build our designs out of exactly this kind of everyday island detail — the walking man, the scooter wall, the night market glow. Have a look at our Taiwan-themed tees, prints and accessories.