No Pedestrians Emoji

A red prohibition circle over a walking pedestrian. 🚷 means foot traffic is not allowed. The source sign is Sign C3i in the 1968 Vienna Convention on Road Signs and Signals, installed on expressway ramps, tunnel mouths, industrial zones, construction perimeters, and most US interstates and German Autobahnen where pedestrians are explicitly banned by law. If you see 🚷 on a sign, the road was designed for vehicles moving faster than you can safely share space with.

Online, 🚷 is rarer than other prohibition emojis. Its use clusters in two places: travel and urbanism content (specifically about high-speed road design, rural road safety, and pedestrian advocacy), and figurative "I need space" posts where the walking figure reads as a stand-in for other people. "🚷 today" can mean "leave me alone" or "focusing on my own path, no followers."

Added to Unicode 6.0 on October 11, 2010 at codepoint U+1F6AB... actually U+1F6B7. Pulled from the Japanese carrier sets where pedestrian-ban signs were standard on tunnels and expressway entrances.

Three uses, each a narrow lane.

Road safety advocacy: urbanism Twitter, Strong Towns adjacent accounts, and transportation engineers use 🚷 in posts about sprawl, stroad design, and the tension between high-speed roads and walkable neighborhoods. The emoji pairs with 🚸 (children crossing) in posts about school-adjacent traffic, and with 🚗💨 for speed-related pedestrian-death content.

Personal boundary signals: posts like "🚷 no visitors today" or "🚷 energy" borrow the walking figure as a metaphor for unwanted social contact. Less common than 🛑 or ⛔ for the same purpose, but distinctive because the pedestrian figure reads as "people."

Hiking and outdoor posts: ironic "if you see 🚷, just walk around it" posts common in trail-running and hiking communities, where pedestrian bans in industrial zones are treated as challenges, politely ignored.

US pedestrian deaths hit 7,148 in 2024, down 4.3% from the 2022 40-year high. 🚷 appears constantly in safety-advocacy posts pushing for better sidewalk infrastructure, where 65% of 2023 pedestrian deaths occurred at locations without sidewalks.

The sign was codified as C3i in the 1968 Vienna Convention, which entered force in 1978. The European Annex to the Convention allows an interesting design variant: the slash can be omitted, leaving just a pedestrian silhouette inside a red circle. Different European countries interpret this differently, which is why the emoji sometimes looks subtly different on European apps.

In the US, the MUTCD treats pedestrian prohibitions slightly differently, using R9-3 "PEDESTRIANS PROHIBITED" or R9-3a "NO PEDESTRIANS" text signs rather than pure pictograms on interstates. The Vienna-style red-circle version is used on some ramps and tunnels but competes with text-based signs almost everywhere else.

Germany's Autobahn made the symbol iconic for a generation of travelers. Pedestrians, bicycles, mopeds, and any vehicle with a top speed under 60 km/h are explicitly banned from the Autobahn. The same sign reappears on French autoroutes, Italian autostrade, and Dutch snelwegen, a continuously linked set of expressways where walking is simply not legal.

Japanese mobile carriers included a no-pedestrians symbol in their private-use emoji sets well before 2010. Unicode adopted 🚷 in version 6.0 at codepoint U+1F6B7 and standardized the rendering to the Vienna design with the red slash intact.

1. 1968Vienna Convention on Road Signs and Signals defines Sign C3i: no pedestrians. Red circle, walking figure, optional slash.
2. 1978Vienna Convention enters into force. Most of Europe adopts standardized pedestrian prohibition signs.
3. 1990Japanese carriers (DoCoMo, KDDI, SoftBank/J-Phone) build pedestrian-ban pictograms into private-use emoji sets.
4. 2010Unicode 6.0 adds 🚷 on October 11 at codepoint U+1F6B7. Standard design uses the Vienna slash.
5. 2015Added to Emoji 1.0 by all major vendors, matching cross-platform renderings.
6. 2023US pedestrian-death rate hits [40-year high of 7,522 in 2022 data](https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/74/wr/mm7408a2.htm), prompting policy conversation where 🚷 and 🚸 appear as common markers.
7. 2024US pedestrian deaths fall 4.3% to 7,148, the [second consecutive annual decline](https://www.ghsa.org/resource-hub/pedestrian-traffic-fatalities-2024-data).

• •US pedestrian deaths totaled 7,148 in 2024, down 4.3% from 2023. This is the second consecutive year of declines, but pedestrian fatalities are still 20% above 2016 levels.
• •65% of US pedestrian deaths in 2023 happened at locations without a sidewalk. The sign says 🚷, but often there was never anywhere to walk in the first place.
• •Light trucks (SUVs, pickups) were involved in 54% of US pedestrian fatalities in 2023, versus 37% for passenger cars. Bigger vehicles, higher hoods, worse pedestrian outcomes.
• •Between 2013 and 2022, US pedestrian death rates rose 50% while the median across 27 other high-income countries fell 19.4%. The US is an outlier on pedestrian safety.
• •Germany's Autobahn explicitly bans pedestrians, bicycles, mopeds, and any vehicle with a top speed under 60 km/h. The 🚷 sign is posted at every entrance.
• •The Vienna Convention's European Annex allows the red slash to be omitted from the no-pedestrians sign, which is why some EU renderings of 🚷 look different from Japanese or American versions.
• •Japanese expressways (高速道路) have banned pedestrians since the Meishin Expressway opened in 1963. The rule predates the Vienna Convention's global standardization by five years.

• •Strong Towns and 'stroad' discourse: urbanism accounts use 🚷 when posting about US road design where pedestrian deaths hit 40-year highs. The emoji sits in a recurring meme format: 🚷 plus a photo of a strip mall with no sidewalks.
• •NotJustBikes YouTube channel: the Dutch-urbanism channel frequently pairs 🚷 with footage of North American six-lane roads to make a point about design-imposed pedestrian exclusion.
• •Smart Growth America 'Dangerous By Design' reports: annual research on pedestrian death rates, posted with 🚷 commentary. The 2024-2025 reports show a small US improvement after a long decline in walking safety.

• •🚷 is codepoint U+1F6B7. Unicode name: NO PEDESTRIANS.
• •Common shortcodes: :no_pedestrians::no_pedestrians: on Discord, Slack, GitHub.
• •Vienna Convention European Annex allows renderings with or without the red slash, so cross-vendor appearance varies subtly.

See the full Emoji Developer Tools guide for regex patterns, encoding helpers, and more.