Saving Time?

I took some notes on the stretch of Mita that goes from Jiro Ramen up to Keio University and down the side street that starts from Ikkei Ramen down to, what I call, the smallest temple in Tokyo. At 11:30 in the morning Jiro had a packed house with a line of 14 outside; all male. Ikkei had a wide open entrance. Aside from the boring notes on the patches of unkept weeds along the sidewalks, I did notice some interesting patterns. The main road that is Route 1, aka Sakurada dori, is a large walkway that is filled with students adorned in colorful fashion. The diagonal tangent strip of road that cuts behind Ikkei, however, is filled with business attired commuters. What I realized is that the commuter road is a back alley short cut to Tamachi station saving at least one intersection of travelling time. The next thing I noticed is how people avoid what I call the serpent section that is on the corner of Totori Donburi which is a door down from Jiro Ramen. Most people crossed at the Keio crossing to save the hassle of having to wait through two whole consecutive lights before getting the green down at the serpent. But, after timing the lights, I discovered that the most a person could expect to wait at the serpent is one minute and fourty eight seconds before receiving the green light. At the Keio crossing, however, the same mistimed approach will mean that the pedestrian will have to wait one minute and fifty seconds. Given that the lights are parallel to each other, if a person should approach the Keio intersection just as it turned red and decided to walk down towards the serpent and faced the same bad timing; he or she would still save two seconds of time. On my next outing there, as part of my interaction with the environment, I will time the sequence of lights between the two intersections to see if the city planners gave some consideration to time the light change for the daily walker. All of this aside, though, the perplexing part of all this time managed walking is that numerous people decided to wait nearly two minutes at the Keio crossing in front of an open seated ramen shop to wait over an hour on line at the Jiro shop and not one of those patrons crossed at the serpent. By the end of my day there the line at Jiro had doubled in size and curved around the building forming another sort of serpent of its own. All patrons were male.