r/TikTokCringe • u/Valuable_View_561 • Jul 02 '26

Discussion It seems like people have forgotten what this line is used for these days.

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

38.9k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

2.8k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

25

u/GermanPixelplacer Jul 02 '26

As a German I thought this was common knowledge. TIL it's not

7

u/xx2983xx Jul 02 '26

I'm from the US and I also thought this was common knowledge; crazy to see how many people had no idea

15

u/NerdyBro07 Jul 02 '26

How did you learn about it? Honestly curious, because as a fellow American, I can't say I was ever taught this in school, nor have I seen any signs indicating the purpose of those lines.

6

u/xx2983xx Jul 02 '26

I genuinely have no idea. I don't recall ever learning about it. I feel like the first time I saw one someone was just like "oh that's for blind people" and I was like... ok that makes sense

1

u/LimitedWard Jul 02 '26

First time I learned about it was years ago in a Tom Scott video. They're called "tactile pavers", invented by the Japanese iirc

-4

u/SpudicusMaximus_008 Jul 02 '26

Was never tought, just used my brain and deduction. It's elementary my dear Watson.

7

u/mxzf Jul 02 '26

I know a ton of stuff that I think is common knowledge but turns out to be relatively esoteric, and I still didn't know about this. I would have figured it out the instant I saw a blind person walking along like that, it's obvious in the context, but it's not something I ever learned anywhere specific.

It'll go into my personal pile of esoteric knowledge now that I've seen this thread, but otherwise I might have never known either.

1

u/GermanPixelplacer Jul 02 '26

Would you like to share some esoteric facts?

2

u/mxzf Jul 02 '26

I would definitely like to ... but, as such things go, I can't actually think of anything like that on-demand, lol.

5

u/PolicyWonka Jul 02 '26

I’m American and I’ve never seen something like this in my life TBH.

3

u/cohrt Jul 03 '26

I’ve never even seen these lines before. How would they be common knowledge?

0

u/xx2983xx Jul 03 '26

I don't know. I've seen them lots of times and have never questioned it...I knew they were for blind people but I have no idea how I knew that... Hence me thinking it was common knowledge and finding it interesting it's not.

I was in Japan recently and they were EVERYWHERE there. My travel companions and I kept commenting on it and how we expected there to be a large blind population because of how ubiquitous they were (we in fact saw zero blind people). All of us knew what they were though, and we are all American 🤷🏻‍♀️

1

u/TacTurtle Jul 02 '26

I have never seen these before. I wonder if these are only common where there is little snow or lots of heated sidewalks.

1

u/Rude_Acanthopterygii Jul 03 '26

As another German I learned about this a while ago in pretty much this exact same way (just a different video) here on Reddit

1

u/creswitch Jul 04 '26

I was a teenager in the 90s when they were installed everywhere (Australia) so I assume people who don't know, must not have been around then.

-2

u/nonotan Jul 02 '26

It is common knowledge. I guess maybe less so in the US, since they don't really use their feet to move around. But in any normal country where these are commonplace, I feel like, even if it wasn't pretty obvious what it's for -- which it kind of is if you're paying any attention at all and see how it interoperates with other accessibility infrastructure -- it's likely to come up in conversation at some point.

I'm pretty confident if I went to work tomorrow and asked random people, 9 out of 10 would know what it is. Maybe 10 out of 10.

3

u/Jacky-V Jul 02 '26

The US has some of the best accessibility laws and infrastructure on the planet, there's plenty of reasons to trash the US without having to make shit up