My Australian kids and 9 and 11 and we are very strict about waiting for the walk signal. Kids that age tend to walk around daydreaming, and just not great at working out how fast cars are moving. Crossing a busy road is literally the most dangerous thing they do.
Another cultural observation, when living in Boston, my partner and I both found it strange that if you were standing on the side of the road, cars will stop and wait for you to cross, even if you were nowhere near a crossing or intersection. Cars seems to give way to pedestrians anywhere an everywhere.
In Australia, cars wont stop for you unless you are at a crossing, and even then you need to make sure they have seen you. Cars zooming through a green light are not going to be looking for pedestrians walking against a red walk signal. The onus is on the pedestrian to not be hit, not the car to avoid the pedestrian.
Update: Also.. its hard not to take this persons criticism personally, so when they say "the UK / Australia model where everyone obeys some stupid rule written on the wall over their own intelligence" I would just like to respond that is a combination of wanting to be polite and courteous to the sign poster, and intelligent enough to know we don't know everything, that the sign might be for our own safety. :)
