He said that, in contrast to the anything-goes, risk-taking ethos that dominated Moscow in the 1990s, “people don’t want to take risks anymore” at crosswalks because they understand that everyone is better off if rules are respected.

It is a view that chimes with Mr. Putin’s repeated calls for greater discipline and order. Soon after taking power, he vowed to introduce a “dictatorship of law” that he said would apply to everyone and put an end to the disorder that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

But many are highly skeptical about whether Mr. Putin has delivered — or even has any real interest in delivering — on that promise. Law enforcement agencies and the courts routinely hound government critics over minor or invented offenses but show little desire to punish the more serious misdeeds of well-connected insiders.

Leon Kosals, a sociologist who teaches in the law department of Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, said Muscovites “know that they cannot get access to justice, that it is not a fair game.” But he said they increasingly try to follow traffic and other rules “because they want to live in a modern country, not because they think the system is now fair.”

Rather than an endorsement of the Kremlin, Mr. Kosals added, such behavior is in some ways a form of silent protest, a defiant display of a desire to enjoy the modernity of the West, a political and cultural zone constantly vilified by state-run news media as a sinkhole of decadent misery rife with Russophobes and homosexuals.

The Moscow city authorities, Mr. Kosals said, deserve credit for curbing the once brazenly corrupt traffic police and investing heavily to beautify the city. But a more important factor in changing pedestrian habits, he said, is the longing of many Muscovites for a different and more civilized life.