Seattle is a city of hippies. Not recycling, Styrofoam, and those little beads in face wash are all sinful. In a world where gas-use is blasphemous, bicyclists and pedestrians are gods. The city is paved in bicycle lanes and crosswalks.
New Orleans is a city of drunks. Sobriety, staying in on the weekend, and lack of indulgence in any form is sinful. In a world with drive-through daiquiris and no money, providers of free booze are gods. The city is too drunk to be paved at all.

Moving from one to the other required a tad of adjustment.

Seattle is one of the safest cities in the nation. Before marijuana was legalized, a person was more likely to get a ticket for jay-walking than smoking a joint.
New Orleans is, relatively speaking, not safe. Police take 2-3 hours on average to arrive at the scene of a car crash with no serious injuries because stabbings and shots fired take precedence. Jay-walk in front of the police station if you like. Won’t nobody look twice.

Seattle has clearly marked, multi-sensory crosswalks; push buttons marked in braille for an audible instruction, complementing the visual indication, to either wait or walk. In some areas, blinking lights directed to the street warn cars to stop for pedestrians and neon orange flags are available to carry across the street to make pedestrians more visible.
New Orleans, on the other hand, is still working (constantly and forever) on paving the roads. I don’t think crosswalks are even on the to-do list.

In Seattle, drivers prepare to stop when pedestrians so much as glance across the street (even when there are no crosswalks).
In New Orleans, drivers don’t stop. Including at crosswalks.

These are generalizations, but not exaggerations.

When I moved to New Orleans, I would watch as entire crowds crossed streets against the light, while I waited for the little, white “walk” man. I’d step into a crosswalk only to have to run across in front of a car that was not slowing down. I watched children seamlessly jay-walk across three lanes of the busiest 40 mph roads in the middle of the day – sometimes stopping between lanes like Frogger. I learned to take my cues from traffic instead of the “walk” men. I learned to stay aware even on the sidewalk: safest to assume every driver was drunk. I gained freedom to roam streets as I wanted, understanding that I was on my own if any cars came along.

After growing accustomed to the Big Easy rules, I returned to Seattle. I would wait for a break in traffic, preparing to jay-walk, and find a car stop in the middle of the road. I’d wait an awkward amount of time, trying to figure out why they had stopped, until they finally waved at me furiously to cross. I learned to actively not look across the street to avoid miscommunicating to passing traffic. I went back to following the little white man and crossing over the spaced white lines when instructed by the disembodied voice. I returned to crossing quickly, even at crosswalks, to get out of cars’ way. I was expected to follow polite pedestrian conduct, but in return, cars would stop for me no matter what.

Through all my travels and studies and experience, I never anticipated culture drastically changing the way I walked down the street, but as it turns out, from the Emerald City to the Big Easy, travel by foot is a world away.