California was always ahead of its time for stupid, fascist, liberty-reducing laws.
Lately in Virginia we have communities like Vienna where every single intersection has a traffic light and all of them are out of sync, so traffic crawls from stop to stop. It's so stupid that most of us don't even go near places like Vienna because it's such a pain to drive through. It's unlikely that whoever thought that system up has considered the economic ramifications of this system, but I'm sure that they're enjoying the control it gave them.
I assume, in the country I grew up in, that is called jaywalking...:)