The crosswalk button my city uses has an LED that illuminates if the button was pressed before. It’s a great UX improvement over the ones without the LED.
yes I've noticed them in my city getting much better, they light up and say "wait" when you press them... newer ones are even becoming contactless so you can wave your hand in front of them
That's true if you only ever press one light. You can still learn the pattern in a given area with experimentation (assuming most lights work the same). I know, for example, that lights in LA indicate that it's already pressed, but would have to experiment in a new city.
Beg buttons are the worst. Traffic engineers who design them into any but the most remote intersections should be ashamed of themselves. One more piece of obscene car culture and dependence.
The only Beg Button I think is worth a flying fig is one that interrupts the cycle. Pedestrians and cyclists should be first class road users. When they push the button it should immediately interrupt the car traffic by cycling to yellow/red and allow the pedestrians to cross. I've spent as much as ten minutes at some intersections waiting to cross and then had to dodge right on red cars and people trying to beat the light. It's absolutely absurd.
Our cities have way over optimized for traffic flow of cars.
Edit: Also, I think crosswalks should be signalized away from intersections with level crossing and dedicated walking paths separate from road noise/pollution. Making people cross at an intersection is way too dangerous.
The crosswalk buttons around me are a frustrating mess. I used to live on a street where the intersection to the main road had a sensor that either couldn't detect my car or just didn't work at all. The only way to get a green light was to have someone get out and hit the crosswalk button, which quickly changes the flow of car traffic.
Meanwhile, I have not seen this behavior anywhere else in the city where it would make sense. Instead, we have almost all crosswalk buttons that do nothing, a few that turn on a light so drivers can know you want to cross (they won't stop, but they'll know), and a few where you will never have a walk signal unless you hit the button, but the light timing does not change. I have watched plenty of tourists helplessly trapped at an intersection not knowing why it never changes.
One late night, I was at a stop light on a side street intersecting with a major 8 lane road. No cars were really coming from any direction, yet, the light would not change for me. Tempted to run the red, I noticed the crosswalk was ~10' from me. So instead of running the light, I jumped out to hit the crosswalk. Within seconds, the lights cycled. I was pleasantly surprised it worked.
0: trains which cannot stop
1: emergency vehicles working a current emergency (when an emergency is not in progress they are 5)
2: pedestrians on foot (including manual wheelchairs)
3: buses in a bus-only lane
4: bicycles and other human powered wheeled transport (ebike count only if most power comes from humans). This includes electric wheelchairs.
5: everything else. Including buses in mixed traffic (which should only be done when traffic is so light that it doesn't matter)
This encourages the type of transport you want people to use in your city.
It really depends on the dynamics of the intersection. In a downtown with pedestrians active at all times of the day, they're not really needed, pedestrians can be assumed.
Suburban intersections really need them and I wouldn't consider them 'the most remote' ... the intersections are large enough that most people can't or won't cross on a minimum length green, so the button lengthens the green time. Additionally, traffic patterns vary, and waiting for a car to trigger the occupancy signal might be a longer wait, and anyway to encourage pedestrianism (false positives from people jumping out of cars isn't that big of a deal in the scheme of things either), the beg button often reduces cycle times to minimums until the pedestrian can cross. The alternative of including pedestrians in all cycles by default is a waste of everyone's time, including pedestrians, given the low pedestrian usage.
Maybe if there was a good way to measure pedestrians on approach and intersection entrance, you could do the same thing you do for cars, and cycle in advance of their arrival and confirm they cleared the intersection before cycling further, but that's asking for a lot.
In remote intersections, you only really need a button if there's significant traffic. Otherwise, crossing whenever there's a clearing is probably better, IMHO. But a button for slow crossers isn't a bad idea.
> Otherwise, crossing whenever there's a clearing is probably better, IMHO.
That's only safe if there are a reasonable number of lanes, namely no more than 2. Beyond that the width is higher, the possibility of a car far away blocking the view of another car slightly behind increases and the driving speed of the cars is increased because it feels safe enough for them. And from what I've seen in the West Coast, narrow human-sized roads are reserved exclusively for back alleys.
I still will hit the yellow bit, but I'm not sure if I need to, or if they are totally automated*. There is absolutely zero feedback, not even the feedback of pushing a button.
British road-crossings often will illuminate a 'WAIT' message on the box when the button has been pressed, which is some great feedback.
(* there is a rotating part on the bottom which gives partially sighted people an indication that the lights are green).
>British road-crossings often will illuminate a 'WAIT'
Some in the US (maybe when I was in DC?) will audibly say "WAIT" from when they're pressed until you can cross, sometimes also counting the time remaining out loud after you get the signal, too.
I prefer the version of it I encountered in Hong Kong; there is a rapid clip of clicks at green, followed by a slower click when flashing red, and then a slow click at red. It's more universal and language-agnostic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnWRQ9yVFYg&t=13s
The sounds are highly directed so you can't hear, say, the crosswalk perpendicular to you, let alone hear it from surrounding buildings.
Unless you are deaf, then you get no feedback. There are buttons near me that don't always trigger when I touch them, but I know to listen for the feedback. (these are touch, not push buttons) Of course they are not universal, there are a lot of buttons around me that give no feedback at all.
They don't need to cover all disabilities, that's ridiculous. Kinds, severities, and combinations of disabilities are endless. We make a reasonable effort that importantly must make sense for the application.
The person you've constructed in this scenario is both blind and deaf. Such an unattended person is in extreme danger on streets with automobile traffic no matter what the crosswalk button does.
No, the person I constructed is only deaf. They attempt to touch a button and do not realize that button did not register their attempt.
I agree that not all disabilities can be accounted for. However the more we account for the better - where accounting is all aspects of getting around. I don't know how to make it safe for a blind and deaf person to navigate streets safely - but I wish it was possible and as soon as I learn of something that works I'll support it.
If they're only deaf, then it's asked and answered because these new buttons have LED indicators and the sound they make can be felt through the housing. The ones near me might as well be knocking.
There is a simple solution for making these buttons accessible for all, and we have them in the UK.
It’s a simple button that clicks, and under the panel there’s a small knob that rotates. Click the button, then place your fingers on the knob and wait for it to start spinning. I can’t tell you if the crossing call button is completely broken (although you’ll figure that out if wait long enough), but broken call buttons in the UK are pretty rare, I’ve only encountered a small handful of broken buttons over 20 years.
I love the synced vibration/beep feature on crossing buttons, as I made a habit of laying my hand on top of the thing while waiting for the light to change. It gets my attention much faster than hearing/seeing the signals change, since I'm usually looking around during the time I'm waiting. Mostly at the lights for cars, since that hints at when it's my turn to go. (I can see and hear just fine, accessibility features like this are just bonus for me.)
It's like the swiss cheese security model. You don't have to and can't cater to every possible individual disability in the same happy path as long as you've provided options to allow people with the most common disabilities to use the $thing in some way. People that are simultaneously blind, deaf, wheelchair-bound, and mute are not actually that common and design guidelines aren't written assuming that every disabled person has every disability simultaneously.
This is the Internet. If something isn't a 100% bulletproof solution for literally every person, real or hypothetical, in every situation ever, it's worthless and the person who mentioned it is an idiot for even bringing it up.
I've encountered buttons with a haptic system in them. They are "still" when it is unsafe to cross and there's no call registered, pulse slowly when a call is registered, and buzz when it is safe to cross, regardless of a call being registered or not.
I'm not sure about Hong Kong, but the PB/5[0] has tactile feedback in addition to audio. You can put your hand on it and feel the clicks.
Slow clicks help deaf users locate the button; fast clicks mean it's safe to cross; silence means you shouldn't enter the crossing because there's not enough time left.
They’re almost perfect, but from what I’ve observed, there are two variants: one where the button sticks out, and another where the button is surrounded by a lip.
I absolutely detest the lip variant. It makes it impossible to slap the button with an open palm, requiring an actual push instead. Particularly with the pandemic, they were near impossible to activate with an elbow. So close to perfection and yet so far…
That said I now have to deal with the terrible British ones, and the attached signals that are supposedly safer - they’re on the same device as the button, supposedly forcing you to look at them and face the traffic. In practise, the inconsistency of whether there’s a crossing indicator on the other side of the road or not means I rely solely on sound cues.
If everyone can just adopt the PB/5, even with the atrocious lip, the world will be a better place.
The crosswalks near me (San Diego) both speak English and make "whimpers" and clicks. They whimper while waiting or when it's time to clear the intersection, and then rapidly and loudly click when it's time to walk. At the same time and in English, they say "wait" repeatedly until the signal changes, then "crosswalk is on across such-and-such street".
Oh god - the fright I had in my first day in LA after I pressed the crosswalk button to cross a 6 lane road and it shouted WAIT at me. I will never forget that.
Maybe you were referencing this and I'm just behind the times, but I read your comment and thought "surely someone has done this before..." And indeed, here's a remix of the "wait" sound (it's not the only one, either - apparently remixing crosswalk noises is a whole subgenre of house music): https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundclou...
I figured it out watching locals. The hand symbol has a rather obvious intention so the 3 dots in a circle symbol obviously has a different one. Didn't take long to intuit from the fact that locals simply didn't interact with that box at all when it had the 3 dots in a circle and the lights still worked as intended.
Whoa, I had no idea this was one of the main purposes of them. From the other comments, it seems that some need to be pushed to change the lights, however, I'm glad to know that some are just for accessibility. Now I'm also not sure which is which :-D
They do in my town. You have to smack it repeatedly until a white "warte" or "signal kommt" lights up on the signal at the other side of the road, or else it never will change.
They also don't vibrate or give any auditory signal (except when the actual green walk signal comes)... I'm not sure how a blind person could use it because their sensitivity is so low that you have to keep touching, pressing, smacking the touch surface until it registers you and updates the (purely visual) signal on the other side. I ended up just crossing illegally at one crosswalk because the damn thing just wouldn't work.
It's specifically the ones with three dots in a circle that are only there for the visually impaired. Some vibrate, some have a spinning thing on the bottom.
If they don't have the three dots in the circle they usually do control the lights. Newer models also show a red light on the side of the button when pressed, similar to the UK lights just more subtle. But there are also plenty of old buttons around that don't.
IIRC if it has three dots, it's for accessibility only - you don't need to press it.
If it has the vague hand symbol, it will probably light up when you "tap" it, but may not actually do anything you notice - one near us it doesn't speed up the light, it just makes it last longer. But for others it might also be necessary to tap it to make the light change!
In Australia, there's an LED present if hitting the button will do anything, which changes intensity when you press the button. In intersections where the LED doesn't do anything, it's either inactive, painted over, or replaced by a black plastic cap.
In other countries I find the lack of feedback quite frustrating.
I don't know about this model, but similar ones in Paris have a physical push-button on the bottom side. Looking at the photo I think maybe there is one in this model too? I don't know the design decision behind this, I heard people saying that it is to avoid abuse which frankly sounds ridiculous.
In the end, it is a like a secret button only the locals know about :)
We have these hidden push-buttons in Norway as well. I believe they enable an audible cue when the pedestrian light turns green so that visually impaired know when to cross. AFAIK they don't actually affect the cycle of the intersection, it's just for accessibility.
It irritates me when people press the crosswalk button on quiet roads (where most of the time there is nothing coming, so you can just cross) before they have even looked to see if anything is coming. Most of the time they then cross immediately and the traffic light will go red some time after they have already crossed, holding up both cars and pedestrians coming behind (who might get there shortly before the traffic light goes green again, so have to wait for that and then wait for the accumulated traffic to clear before they can cross). There is a walking route near me that crosses a lot of roads and I not infrequently get caught behind someone doing this so I get stuck at every crossing.
I posted moderation replies to people on both sides of the argument who were breaking the site guidelines. It's possible that I missed others. This is common, actually, because we don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted to HN and we often don't read the threads in order.
If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, that's the likeliest explanation. You can always help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
This is a perfect case of thinking you are doing a net good, but in actuality just doing more harm by pissing a lot of drivers off and potentially causing a road rage incident. Do this in a large northern city and you may even get more than what you bargained for.
Edit: also, please don't take HN threads further into flamewar! as you did below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38477500. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
That's pretty antisocial behavior. Humans walk, humans drive cars, and we have good reasons for both modes of transportation. Crosswalks are an attempt to allow coexistence safely.
Antagonizing people who are using a different mode of transportation at the moment does not seem helpful at all. You may even cause other people to become accustomed to seeing crosswalk signals activated for no reason, reducing their attentiveness and increasing the risk of injury to people actually crossing the road.
Imagine how irritating it is for every pedestrian to have to wait for every light to change, for their momentary privilege to walk across a 5ft-wide space that often has cars poking their hoods into it.
Yes, everyone wishes they could move unimpeded by anybody else. But, we live in a society with many different kinds of users so we accept a bit of inconvenience in the pursuit of safety.
It is the opinion of many that we have over-optimized our public spaces to nearly the sole benefit of private vehicular traffic. Apologies for the initial sarcastic reply.
Not sure if it's everywhere - but where I am it is actually illegal to cross when it says don't cross and you can get a ticket for it. (not saying it's actually enforced).
Jay walking laws are slowly being walked back in some places.
The history of such laws are interesting, by the way.
That said, most of the time and in most places I've been, the de facto reality is that it's essentially lawless. Neither pedestrians nor drivers are being policed effectively and they all kind of do whatever.
I still find the concept of jaywalking absurd. It doesn't exist in the UK and I first heard about it from an American friend at Uni who was shocked I would "jaywalk" in front of a police officer. I genuinely thought she was winding me up.
> It irritates me when people press the crosswalk button on quiet roads (where most of the time there is nothing coming, so you can just cross) before they have even looked to see if anything is coming.
Since you're comfortable asking pedestrians to jaywalk across the street if it looks clear, maybe you should also get comfortable with simply running the red lights on these quiet roads, since nothing is coming. At least in your case, you have a giant machine with airbags to protect you if you make a mistake.
> Since you're comfortable asking pedestrians to jaywalk across the street if it looks clear,
According to the rest of his comment, most of them are jaywalking:
> Most of the time they then cross immediately and the traffic light will go red some time after they have already crossed
I.e., they come to the intersection, hit the crosswalk button, and then jaywalk across instead of waiting for the signal to change. The signal then actually changes after they are across.
> maybe you should also get comfortable with simply running the red lights on these quiet roads, since nothing is coming. At least in your case, you have a giant machine with airbags to protect you if you make a mistake.
I do not have a car. It is while walking that I am affected by the behaviour.
There's a light in a village by me that won't give the walk signal unless someone hits the button, but instead will let cars turn. Last weekend when I went up to this light (as a pedestrian), there were two other pedestrians waiting. I had (wrongly) assumed that they had hit the button. But we waited two light rotations and I heard them complain about it not letting them cross. Then I hit the button myself and the next rotation it let us cross.
> When a stranger murdered Kitty Genovese outside of her Brooklyn apartment while thirty seven bystanders watched without so much as calling the police, the Volunteer's Dilemma went mainstream
"A.M. Rosenthal, who went on to become executive editor of The Times, stands by the article he assigned to Mr. Gansberg 40 years ago, right down to the word ''watched'' in its opening sentence. This questioning of details, he said, is to be expected.
''In a story that gets a lot of attention, there's always somebody who's saying, 'Well, that's not really what it's supposed to be,''' said Mr. Rosenthal, who is retired from The Times and now writes a column for The Daily News. There may have been minor inaccuracies, he allows, but none that alter the story's essential meaning. ''There may have been 38, there may have been 39,'' he said, ''but the whole picture, as I saw it, was very affecting.''"
Yes. Especially since they have found that yes there was a call to the police.
That was after the initial attack was stopped when someone called out from the windows above and she was only murdered when the attcker came back to finish the job down a dark lane.
Another instance of pedestrian congestion that’s really jarring to me are serial pedestrian crossings on roads with opposing traffic lanes separated by pavement, often on intersections. It may look like this: <https://maps.app.goo.gl/ErBFC2oXV21oQ9U7A>. For some reason, the traffic lights are programmed in such a way that most of the time you need to be almost running (I’d say something like 8-10 km/h) to ever have a chance of crossing both crossings in one go, even when you start walking at the beginning of the green light. Instead you’re almost always (the durations change throughout the day) guaranteed to stop before the second light and have fun breathing in the fumes from a high-traffic road. I can’t think of it as anything but hostile to pedestrians.
That seems fair, though? That's a pretty long crossing if you include the sidewalk in the grassy area as part of one continuous crossing. If it were a median, I'd agree with you, but that's almost a small park. Just plain grass, it could use some shrubs & trees, but still.
There is nothing there? It connects to nothing? There is no reason to be there and no pedestrian wants to be there. It exists purely to facilitate this absurdly overbuilt intersection (and bizarrely, a bunch of parking spots).
It looks like they created a sort-of-roundabout-ish traffic pattern with the intersection, which is why it is so large. I assume it is a fairly busy location?
The parking spots were probably just opportunistic use of the extra space. They seem have been removed, if you look on street view. The satellite view is from 2019 or before, but some of the street views are 2020 and 2021 and show that they've removed the parking and added road capacity.
Seems a good place to ask a question I’ve been asking myself for a long time, and couldn’t figure out the answer to: why do lonely crosswalks not immediately turn the lights red for the cars when you push the button? Or at least, after a very short delay (< 3 seconds).
For street crossings with multiple directions and multiple lights, that behavior makes sense. You’re waiting for the next pre-programmed phase that syncs you up with other parts of the crossing. For large roads it might make sense, you don’t want to interrupt the flow of the traffic that is expected to hit a green light down the road at current speed.
But for the lonely crossing light in front of the school building in a small street, why do I have to wait 20 seconds after pushing it, every single time?
I've experienced this behaviour. During the middle of the day at an intersection of a side street with a busy street it can take a long time to turn. At night when the busy street isn't so busy, it seems to often turn relatively quickly.
Are you waiting 20 seconds for the cross light to turn amber or 20 seconds for your walk light to come on? Because the latter is always going to take at least ~10 seconds -- the stale green time + the amber time + all-red time.
Waiting for amber takes 20 seconds. Also it’s not a timeout of some case from repeated use. Have to wait even if it wasn’t used for several minutes beforehand.
> Waiting for amber takes 20 seconds. Also it’s not a timeout of some case from repeated use. Have to wait even if it wasn’t used for several minutes beforehand.
In my hometown there is a light that is nearly instant during low-traffic hours. When I would walk to work in the morning I would press it and it would immediately go yellow->red but when I came home in the afternoon, with higher levels of traffic, I'd have to wait for the cycle.
That's a regional/local choice. In my area, we have a number of signaled crosswalks which never activate unless someone pushes the button. They are absolutely instant.
They're not traffic signals, though, they are a dozen or so strobing yellow lights. It's effectively a red light based on local law, but it's way more noticeable for approaching traffic.
In general, traffic light synchronization is very important to optimize street capacity, but it depends on heuristics limited by the sensor, modelling, programming etc. resources.
Of course it does something in this instance. Otherwise the light would never change to the barely-used crossing.
There’s a pervasive myth about elevator buttons and crosswalk buttons being there as placebos. Yes, I’m certain there are instances where—when the traffic lights regularly cycle all day long—they might be placebo buttons, but the vast majority of them will at least lengthen the cycle time for your direction, and if appropriate will trigger a change sooner than it would have occurred otherwise.
The door close button: Yeah, you're right. I was thinking of the lobby call buttons. Ignore that I said anything about that. (Of course the button is still wired up, it just only works in fire service mode in those cases)
As far as crosswalks go: Yeah, on major intersections where light cycling is guaranteed to happen all day, the button may not accelerate the change. But that doesn't apply to "lonely crosswalks", and I bet that same button will work in the middle of the night if the cross-street happens to die off during those hours. I caveated that in my comment.
There is a pedestrian crossing installed in Big Cottonwood Canyon in Utah, by a popular sledding hill, a few miles down-canyon of two large ski hills. It is essentially an "instant" transition crossing. The moment a pedestrian triggers it, it switches on warnings, and very quickly turns to solid red stop. The solid stop lasts upwards of 15 seconds, at which point it turns to a warning stop (stop and roll through, flashing red lights).
There is no cool-down period on how frequently it can trigger, and there is no platooning, so at the end of the day when everyone is going home, intermittent pedestrian traffic, say, one person every 20 seconds, is enough to back traffic up all the way to the end of the canyon.
A simple bit of platooning, or a traffic detector (loops aren't good in the canyons, plows rip em up, so probably a radar based approach), would solve this, for this case at least
The simple answer is that a society cars are heavily prioritized and pedestrians and cyclists are not.
So traffic engineers by default set crossing buttons to have a delay so the poor motorists aren't somehow inconvenienced by a person wanting to cross.
Note that I'm not referring to lights where pushing the button inserts a crosswalk cycle into the next light change. I'm talking about single street crossings where you push the button and nothing happens for anywhere from 30 seconds to minutes.
> why do lonely crosswalks not immediately turn the lights red for the cars when you push the button? Or at least, after a very short delay (< 3 seconds).
The ones in my part of the US do this when the traffic is light or nonexistent, but only with the streets that have car sensors embedded in them.
Do you not have zebra crossings where you are? Striped line going across the road, with "flashing amber beacons" on either side, where cars must stop if someone is crossing or waiting to cross.
I think they're mainly a UK/Ireland thing, which confused the hell out of me when I went to continental europe and saw the same road markings paired with actual traffic lights + button. (here, that'd be a "pelican crossing" and have different road markings)
The versions that I hate are where there are always flashing yellow lights at those whether there is a pedestrian present or not. It is confusing and teaches people to ignore the flashing light as it is meaningless. I prefer the kind where a pedestrian presses a button and the lights flash to tell the cars to stop.
I can't answer your question but I can at least confirm the tech exists!
They do exactly what you're proposing here in the UK (at least, the ones that have been recently upgraded in the town I live do) - if there's no cars around it'll instantly cycle the road lights to red (via amber) and then the pedestrian crossing goes green. Pretty much inside the 3 seconds requested too.
Even the ones with multiple directions. No cars? Ped can go as soon as the road lights are red.
The traffic light system before these upgrades was locked into the same cycle you describe - pressing the button would just add a "pedestrians can go now" phase into the normal light pattern.
Having said all that if there's no cars around I'll just cross the road without interacting with the traffic lights at all lol
It shouldn't matter whether cars are present or not. Why doesn't it just go red to let the pedestrian cross immediately? Obviously with some min interval to stop abuse.
There's a particularly bad one at a busy foot and cycle path near me. It takes a minute to cross after pressing at all times. I know it's done to ease congestion on the busy road but that's wrong. Congestion should be allowed but only the participants (car users) subjected to it. Otherwise it's just making cars more enjoyable at everyone else's expense.
I wish my local council would use this. Here on my High Street in South London, my nearest pedestian crossing can take up to two minutes to change, even when there are no cars close. It's frustrating for pedestrians (and motorists, when someone has pressed the button, got fed up, dashed through the moving traffic, and then when the lights do go red there's no-one waiting to cross)
Something I do like about these new lights is that if you do press the button then go out of the crossing area it'll unset the button pressed status (assuming there's nobody else in the crossing areas covered by the light system ofc)
I usually encounter this when a line of cars go through their green and I dash across behind them quick enough for it to unset and not disrupt the normal light cycles. It's a daft little thing but it feels so darn efficient to get across without interrupting traffic, haha
Yeah, the wait can be dangerous too. I grew up in Northern Ireland where the systems are quite simple. For some years I lived in the Netherlands and got used to smart systems that would give me instant green if I could cross etc. But then I returned myself home for a while and was shocked with how often I was waiting, to the point that after a few days I started treating some traffic light systems as optional or to be avoided while crossing elsewhere on the road. The result of the poor system meant I was crossing without any system.
> ... why do lonely crosswalks not immediately turn the lights red for the cars when you push the button?
Sometimes Occam's razor[0] provides a satisfactory explanation:
Traffic engineers have to take into account people pressing a request button at an arbitrary point in time, or with high frequency, which can cause significant negative impact to traffic flow if a minimum is not enforced.
While a person, or relatively small set of people, seeking to cross a street is made to wait, the numerous people driving are kept moving such that traffic back pressure can be minimized.
They could have a minimum interval between changes, while still allowing it to change quickly if enough time has elapsed since the previous "walk" signal.
> They could have a minimum interval between changes, while still allowing it to change quickly if enough time has elapsed since the previous "walk" signal.
This approach would not satisfy the very real use-case scenario of pedestrians pressing the request button whilst having no intention to cross.
By having a "request -> delay -> satisfy" workflow, instead of a "request -> satisfy -> delay" one, traffic engineers can at least minimize the impact of random jerks.
Who said anything about frequency? For that explanation to make sense, the designer has to deliberately forget that you can put the delay after the cycle.
I did, for the purpose of presenting a context to try to explore the original question:
>> Seems a good place to ask a question I’ve been asking myself for a long time, and couldn’t figure out the answer to: why do lonely crosswalks not immediately turn the lights red for the cars when you push the button? Or at least, after a very short delay (< 3 seconds).
Just because a pedestrian desires to reach their destination by crossing a road does not negate the desires of those driving to reach their destinations. Neither desire is more important than the other and a legitimate case can be made for slightly prioritizing drivers due to the volume of people involved.
> ... the designer has to deliberately forget that you can put the delay after the cycle.
That choice would prioritize one person, or at most a few, over those in vehicles having the same desire. Plus, it does not factor in impact with regard to other traffic control devices (a.k.a. "stop lights").
I guess the fundamental question is; does the want of one person outweigh those of others if that "one person" happens to be you?
> That choice would prioritize one person, or at most a few, over those in vehicles having the same desire.
I disagree.
The flow of cars is (roughly) continuous, and the button presses are (roughly) randomly timed. Adding a delay to the button does not affect the experience of the cars. They still see a randomly timed red light. Even if there was an hour-long delay (with multiple pushes in flight), that wouldn't prioritize cars in any meaningful way. They'd still see the light change every 2-10 minutes or whatever it is, and whether they are caught by the light will still be random.
I think we DO want to interrupt the flow of traffic. Cars should be slowed down in areas where a lot of people want to cross the street. Want to go fast? Do what they do; ditch the car and walk!
In a place I used to live there was an very low traffic intersection on a road between my office and my home where the light was misprogrammed or had a bad trigger and would consistently take many minutes before switching to one direction (the direction between my home and office). But hitting the crosswalk to cross the perpendicular road would make it turn green (and the always-green direction red) in seconds. I believe the button instantly set the light to yellow, so the only delay was the yellow time.
So if my partner was with me she'd always hop out and hit the button. :P
Of course, perhaps discouraging that behavior is a reason they aren't usually fast like that. :)
> But for the lonely crossing light in front of the school building in a small street, why do I have to wait 20 seconds after pushing it, every single time?
You don't have to, just cross the street and ignore the "criminalisation" of said basic action (i.e. crossing an empty street) as "jay-walking".
Around here the lights either turn green shortly after you press the button (with a minimum wait time between greens), or there are no buttons at all (or they exist but are ignored).
I can say it's very interesting to see what people from several places consider common on this thread. Most traffic laws seem to be absolutely insane; I wonder insanity there are on my local laws that I'm too used to notice.
I have been wondering the same thing myself. I would go a step further and suggest that non-lonely crosswalks should work to prioritize pedestrians over cars.
Even in a place like California where pedestrians supposedly have the right-of-way, it would encourage more walking if we try not to make it an inconvenience.
TFA explains the cost of phoning the cops on Kitty as being paperwork hassle.
The crosswalk button scenario is therefore not comparable; there's no cost (to the button-pusher) in pressing the button, even if they aren't planning to cross at all.
There is an intersection near Disneyland that always has pedestrians on one of the crossings (S Harbor Blvd and W Katella Ave). They should remove the buttons. I think I stood there through two cycles before I worked my way through the crowd to push the button. On the flip side it gets you in the right mood for waiting in lines all day...
I always hit it because pressing it is practically free, yet in the case that it needs pressing, the punishment for not pressing it is high (extended, possibly infinite wait). maybe it is not connected to anything, maybe someone else already pressed it, I don't care because I don't have that information and pressing it is free so I can't lose anything by pressing it, but can lose by not pressing it.
The button has no downside, with a possible benefit, so always push it. Also refers to discredited Bystander effect nonsense regarding Kitty Genocese murder: "there is no evidence for the presence of 38 witnesses, or that witnesses observed the murder, or that witnesses remained inactive." https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2F0003-066X.6...
You had to turn a doorknob to leave the house, but you're too disabled to push a fucking button designed for handicapped UX?
You're going to touch traces of a million other people's gender fluids on every single other thing you touch during your errand. Germophobia is very selective.
Makes sense for the big buttons, but some of them have tiny ones with a little rain hat, inexplicably. Why don't they all have big buttons, which are much easier to push?
We just have these stupid unpressable buttons near me. They're big with an embossed arrow on them, but if try to press it it might budge a quarter of a millimeter. I still don't understand how they work, if they're supposed to be capacitive or just have really tiny press windows. But they give zero satisfying feedback that you've successfully pressed the button. I hate them so much. And if you hit them hard they will murder your hand.
There is one downside. Here in Australia, the walk signal does not happen unless you press the button. The unwritten convention is that if you are the first to the button, you will press it. Others arriving later will not press, for fear of looking like untrusting fools.
This works fine 99% of the time. However, sometimes my wife will be there. She never presses the button (because she’s ADHD and always forgets), but stands nice and close. A pile of pedestrians will mill around, the lights will change, and the walk signal will stay red! Someone will then annoyedly step in and press the button approximately 20 times while everyone waits for another light cycle to complete.
Her other trick is to enter an elevator and press no buttons. Eventually the lift will go somewhere, but she is often surprised at the destination!
Floor 3. It goes to floor 3. At least in my building, which I think has 5 floors. So I guess it wants to wait in the middle to be equidistant to all floors, but I suspect there is a flaw in that math because ground floor probably gets more traffic.
Don't you have indicators? In Spain the buttons (which BTW are increasingly uncommon, cars lost the battle) have two large indicators, lit depending on the state:
No indicators on the unit itself, but the opposite side normally only has the red man light illuminated if you've pressed it doesn't it, and no light at all if it needs to be pressed and hasn't?
At least that's the way it is here in NZ, and when I've been in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane I haven't obviously noticed a general difference to here in NZ (there are particular crossings that are sometimes a bit different, i.e. you never need to press, but)...
That big button, incidentally, is quite a nice piece of industrial engineering. It uses a hall effect sensor and magnets to maximise the lifetime of the button.
In Finland there is just a light above button in the box. It will light up when it is activated. Or actually when cycle is activated so also for other side. Decent enough UI for non blind, with blind I think there is sound in some cases.
Some pedestrian crossing buttons play different audible beats so blind people know when they can cross. Famously the beat of one in Sydney was sampled for a Billie Eilish song (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-zeJRjP6xA skip to around 4:00 mins).
However others have no indicator or sound. To make things even more confusing is the pedestrian crossings can also be programmed to happen automatically at peak times with no button press, but absolutely need a button press outside of peak hour.
I find this so interesting because I also live in Australia but I will always press the button if close enough without much thought. I’ve gone my whole life thinking of this as just a normal thing, if not a slightly good thing for being the person who can be bothered to press it. So i was completely unaware of this unspoken thing haha.
One downside I've encountered: some crosswalk buttons in Arlington VA make very loud robo-voice announcements about their status only after you've pressed them. Very good for the visually impaired, I assume, but irritating for me. And the signals are on a timer, so it doesn't help to press them.
Yeah, it's not much. In any other circumstance I press the dang button.
Crosswalks in busy areas shouldn't have buttons and should allow pedestrian crossings automatically as part of the cycle. In less dense areas, buttons should change the light more or less immediately to allow pedestrian crossing. Neither of these scenarios are usually the case since these intersections are almost always designed with cars as the paramount concern and pedestrians as an afterthought.
I recently visited Bellevue, WA and experienced one of the most anti-pedestrian "walking streets" I have ever encountered. Crosswalk buttons on a busy street full of shops and restaurants, yes, but even worse were the orange flags left out for pedestrians to grab and use like they are part-time crossing guards. No stop signs. No speed bumps. Just orange flags for the suckers walking instead of driving. To add insult to injury, the flags always ended up on one side of the street, making the entire project half-broken at best.
The worst part: this is their literal Main Street.
>In less dense areas, buttons should change the light more or less immediately to allow pedestrian crossing.
I'm not sure I understand the reasoning for this. If a car approaches a less-busy intersection it triggers the lights to cycle, but not immediately. I'm not sure why pedestrians would get such priority, rather being placed into the natural cycle.
FWIW I just came back from Thailand and it was rather eye opening - crosswalks are ignored by motorists, and there's much less hand-holding, but people manage to get by. There's more give-and-take rather than rigid rule following.
In the Netherlands, bicycles and pedestrians get default priority, and often car lights go green when they detect a car in a loop in time for the car to reach the intersection.
This setup as I understand is preferred because it aligns with their modal priorities, and it is easier and more reliable to detect a heavy metal car than a person or a bicycle.
Depending on the intersection, having a pedestrian crossing as part of the cycle can slow the flow of traffic. Instead of having it cycle for pedestrians every time, even when no one is there, the button can interrupt the normal cycle and allow the pedestrian to cross. But most of the time, the intersection will be working optimally for cars, since we're assuming pedestrians are few and far between. I feel like I've seen a lot of these intersections near freeways in strip-mall type areas. Except the way they function currently, that occasional pedestrian has to potentially wait a long time.
I also just got back from Bangkok and frankly crossing busy streets is one of the worst aspects of the place, it really makes it very difficult to easily get around on foot and you are really placing a lot of faith that drivers are actually paying attention when you step out onto a main road.
When I worked in Mumbai it took me about two weeks to learn how to cross the street: just walk out into the traffic with your hand up, and everyone goes round you. Everyone ignores the lights, so you just need to take your chances. I got hit by mirrors a couple of times, but since everyone expects to see pedestrians in the road it generally works.
New York though... so often I'm crossing on green and there's some truck edging round the corner into my path, driver making eye contact, daring me to try to make him stop.
American crosswalks are just insane. In Europe cars are not allowed to drive through the crossing on the "walk" signal. In the US the pedestrian is expected to run the gauntlet, hoping that turning cars will see you and not mow you down. Pretty sure this is what is going to kill me, and that's in one of the more pedestrian friendly cities in the country, San Francisco.
Keep the button, but for goodness sake stop letting cars drive through crosswalks in the "walk" phase.
I lived in downtown SF for a long time and I agree the crosswalks are a battlefield. Not just cars edging ahead or making right turns (or left turns on one way to one way), but cyclists like to stop square in the middle of crosswalks as well.
I live in NY now and though the traffic laws are roughly the same, I almost never fear for my safety when crossing like I regularly did in SF.
FWIW, cyclists do that for their own safety. It gets them out from between the cars stacked up behind. And also lets them clear the intersection while most cars are stopped (cross traffic stopped, same-way traffic only getting started).
While you’re asking for better pedestrian infrastructure, consider asking for protected bike lanes as well.
Yeah, I try not to block crosswalks if it looks like anyone will be using it, but partially into the crosswalk often feels like the safest place to be while waiting for a light.
In London we have those but cars frequently stop over them either because the drivers are ignorant of the rules, they don’t care or they were too ambitious about making a green and ended up being forced to stop at the last minute. So as a cyclist I frequently have to push up to the pedestrian crossing for my own safety from cars behind.
That’s my daily hell. I walk to work and there’s a 6 lane road to cross. The signal works as designed, but that means cars are turning right in green while I’m crossing. And with big wide corners, they’re going around the bend at 35+ mph.
It would be so much safer to do a pedestrian scramble. There aren’t a lot of pedestrians at this intersection, maybe one every 4-5 cycles, so it’s not going to slow traffic much if at all to have a 30-45second dedicated time where we can walk all the way across.
"Scramble" is a funny term for that. I guess it kind of looks like the pedestrians are "scrambling" to an outsider but hopefully most of them know where they're going and aren't scrambling.
I think that author likes to make up words, like "Stroad".
"Stroad" seems like a funny term at first, but watching the video about Stroads is almost as radicalizing as trying to push a stroller anywhere (or, frankly, taking a young child anywhere at all without a car).
Strollers have their uses, but are radically overused to the detriment of families who become over-reliant on them. They keep the kids dependent, detached from the world, and physically weak. Typical infants can be wrapped on an adult's chest, can be mostly riding on shoulders by 9 months old, and kids can be walking independently most of the time by age 2 or 2.5 and participating in conversation with accompanying adults. By age 4 or so typical kids can continuously walk several miles at decent speed without any issue.
I regularly see 4+ year-olds sitting in a stroller playing phone games or just looking bored and disengaged, while the adult pushing the stroller otherwise completely ignores them, and it always makes me cringe.
> kids can be walking independently most of the time by age 2 or 2.5
One thing I've noticed, they don't walk very well while taking a nap. And you just get so much more out of a day when you don't have to return home in the middle.
With my kids it was never a problem to just let them sleep wherever we happened to be sitting (restaurant chairs, museum benches, bus seats, a patch of grass, my lap, ...). Occasionally I was stuck carrying a sleeping kid around for a while, but that was also typically fine. A stroller might be mildly more convenient on rare occasions, but it was never a big deal, and the kids becoming self-sufficient much earlier and more completely (with respect to mobility) than most of their peers was more than worth any trouble. YMMV.
A 2 year old walks far too slow to keep up with older people, and is especially a concern while crossing a road. They also get distracted and do not necessarily follow instructions.
There is a pretty big difference between using a stroller to help get a toddler (less than 5 years old) around and using it to pacify a 5 year old. In my experience, somewhere between 4 and 5 is when I expect them to be able to walk at a sufficient pace and distance to never need strollers.
A 2-year-old can be very easily carried on an adult's shoulders if you're in a huge hurry, but much of the time it's better to just slow down to the kid's speed. If kids get substantial practice walking every day, their speed and stamina improves quite quickly. By age ~3 they are quite able to keep up with a moderate adult pace, and by 4 they'll be running all around faster than you probably want to walk.
In Shibuya in Tokyo, there's a famous "scramble intersection" スクランブル交差点, and I assume the "scramble" part came from somewhere in the English speaking world.
> hopefully most of them know where they're going and aren't scrambling
I don’t get the sense from “scramble” that the pedestrians would not know where they are going. Scramble can mean a sudden act of motion, like “they scrambled the jets” or “once we have stopped we all scrambled off the coach”.
There is an alternative meaning where it is used to signify that something is intentionally mixed up or even encrypted, such as “scrambled egg” or “can’t intercept their plans anymore, they scrambled the signal”. Maybe that is the meaning you are thinking about?
You can ignore new terms if you wish, but it is useful for describing a common street pattern in North America. The term is increasingly being used by urban planners.
We already had a term for that, a four lane, and "street" and "road" are synonymous so combining them doesn't produce new meaning
The only people who use that word are insufferable choads who want me to give up my car and live in a tiny apartment because of their misguided belief that if everyone lived like they do in Manhattan global warming would end and the world would be a Utopia
"Stroad" is a shibboleth that tells me you're someone with an opinion that is not worthwhile
> the pedestrian is expected to run the gauntlet, hoping that turning cars will see you and not mow you down
This goes for us in Canada too. I tell my kids to "be quick or be dead, but be safe". Probably kind of morbid, but an intersection is not a place to hang out.
Morbid can be good. I feel like more parents need to remind their kids of death now and then. I know that sounds crazy, but I really think that a healthy knowledge and acceptance of death is a big part of what makes a well developed and healthy person.
Right on red is also allowed in many metro areas, which is pretty dangerous for pedestrians. I get it for rural roads with no crosswalks or pedestrian traffic...but in cities right on red should be illegal. It actually was illegal until the 70s oil embargo.
I don't mind if cars drive through on the walk phase as long as they slow to a crawl and make sure no one is walking first. Sometimes the road is very much clear because the person has already crossed, there's no need to hold up the cars.
And I say this as a pedestrian, I walk to work. And I am afraid of getting hit every day but for a different reason. The crosswalks are in the stupidest friggin spots, around a bend in the road, and cars are apparently allowed to park right up against the crosswalk so if even want a hope in hell of being seen you have to walk part way onto the road, and peak your head around the van that's blocking the view for both you and oncoming cars, and then hope they can see you around the bend in the road.
At least in Germany (where I live), it is entirely normal for the pedestrian lights to be synchronized with the road parallel to it, meaning that turning cars will cross the path of walking pedestrians. However, by law pedestrians have the right of way in these situations (since cars are crossing their path), and generally that is being respected. I'd say that's what sets it apart from the US in that regard.
We even have right on red in some metro areas, though admittedly that's where things can get quite dangerous at times.
It's the same in the US legally speaking, but from what I've seen, intersections in Germany are designed so that the car is positions pretty much prependicularly to the crosswalk as it crosses, giving the driver good visibility to people crossing. And the right corners reduce the speed of people as they turn.
I assume it's the turn right on red that conflicts with the pedestrian green light
Although that's the same in Europe, if you turn right on green you usually have to be aware of a green pedestrian light that crosses the street you want to turn into.
The difference is that here in Austria walking is much more common and you usually get fined quickly if you take the right of way from a pedestrian
The rule in Netherland is that traffic going straight ahead (including pedestrians) have right of way over traffic making a turn. So cars turning right on green have to stop for pedestrians crossing on green.
But Dutch traffic lights for cars also make clear whether or not this is an issue you need to watch out for; if the traffic light has an arrow pointing right, you're guaranteed to not be crossing pedestrians on green. If it's a solid circle, you need to watch out. My driving instructor paid a lot of attention to that.
Try downtown Johannesburg, turning cars are supposed to wait for pedestrians when it’s a green pedestrian light, but the minibus taxis will intentionally drive through the crossings forcing gaps between pedestrians. You almost have to hold your nerve because if you don’t use the green, you’ll never be able to cross.
And of course being South Africa you also have to watch out for the “stopped” cars, which are never quite stopped and actually edge forward while the driver is checking their phone and not watching if they’ll bump into a pedestrian crossing. When I used to run there I had to tap the bonnet/hood of cars multiple times to catch the attention of the driver because they were edging forward over the crossing while checking their phone.
>>In Europe cars are not allowed to drive through the crossing on the "walk" signal.
That's not true - in Poland you get a green right turn arrow even on red, and you can legally drive over a crossing even when the pedestrians have a green light to cross. It is absolutely your responsibility to make sure that it is safe to do so.
That's crazy, because we have the same right green arrow on red here in Romania but I'd go to jail were I to, God forbid, hit the pedestrians crossing the street on "their" green. If there are pedestrians on the crosswalk, you're turning right and you haven't stopped for them, chances are you'll get your license taken by the police (if the police happens to be in the area).
I agree that the pedestrians should double-check in these sorts of situations, because the cemetery is full with people who have had the law on their side, but, nevertheless, it's primarily the drivers' responsibility to respect the law.
Sorry maybe this is a misunderstanding, I mean it as "you can drive over a [pedestrian] crossing" not "you can drive over a pedestrian".
Obviously actually hitting anyone crossing the road would land you in jail. And yes you also have to stop if anyone is on the crossing. But assuming there isn't anyone and you have the green arrow then you can still drive over the crossing, even though pedestrians have a green "walk" light displayed.
In Finland green arrow will explicitly tell you that no one else including pedestrians have right of passage. You are still not allowed to drive over anyone, but pedestrians certainly do not have green light at such moments.
Sure, which is my entire point - "Europe" isn't one place with unified rules everywhere. The "green arrow means you have unconditional priority" is actually a rule in Poland too.......except when it comes to this tiny side arrow for turning right on red. With that one you have to give priority to people crossing.
Same in Netherland. Arrow means it's guaranteed to be safe (unless a pedestrian is running a red light, which is possible and not an excuse to hit them), whereas a solid circle means you have to watch out for crossing bikes and pedestrians (though of course you should always watch out).
>It is absolutely your responsibility to make sure that it is safe to do so.
In aviation safety, it has long been established that, regardless of how clearly you establish who is responsible for what, if reality is such that people frequently can't actually carry out their responsibilities effectively, then you'll end up with disasters; disasters where you'll have someone to officially blame, but disasters nonetheless.
This is quite relevant to many pedestrian-car interactions. The problem with right turns over crossings where pedestrians have priority, is that in many situations, even if the driver is responsible for ensuring the turn is safe, it isn't possible for them to do so effectively. In many California right-on-red situations, for example, the driver is responsible both for ensuring that the road to their left is clear, and that the crossing to their right (and in front of them) is clear. Traffic, visibility, and speeds often mean that ensuring the road to the left is clear requires the driver to be looking far to their left until almost immediately before turning, and then accelerate quickly. At the same time, ensuring crossings are clear requires them to look both ahead and to their right, and similarly, visibility and layout often mean that the relevant portion of the crossing can go from being clear to blocked almost instantly, so the driver must be looking to their right immediately before turning. The two responsibilities conflict, and in order to turn, the driver must choose which risk to prioritize: if they prioritize checking for pedestrians, they'll increase the risk of a two-vehicle collision, and if they prioritize checking for vehicles, they'll increase the risk of hitting a pedestrian. Not turning is an option, but at least in California there would be considerable pressure culturally and from other drivers to do so, potentially to the level of threats and violence. It is not a good situation to put someone in.
The only time I have ever been hit by a car as a pedestrian was when I was very mildly hit by a driver turning right immediately after I stepped into a crossing. Legally, she was entirely at fault, but as I already felt the crossing was problematic, she was very apologetic, and I was entirely uninjured, we just didn't report it. And in hindsight, the intersection was just horrible. She couldn't see me because I was to her right and would have been obscured by trees and parked cars until immediately before entering the crossing; in order to avoid being hit by traffic, she needed to look to the left. While not legally my responsibility, in order to see her, I would have needed to look behind me before entering the intersection, but I also needed to watch carefully for cross traffic. In utterly bad design, despite heavy traffic and a 35mph speed limit, pedestrians always had legal right of way at the crossing, so she couldn't even have waited to have right of way.
No, it varies. Turning cars in Britain never go over 'walk' crossings, but they do in Denmark. It's something I check whenever I drive to a new country.
I think "right turn on red" should be banned first, as this leads to a car drive looking left to see if the road is clear, rather than looking right where pedestrians might be crossing.
I've spoken to my friends on how right-on-red is one of the most anti-pedestrian rules of the street that exist. It was like pulling nails trying to convince them that the added convenience for motorists is not worth the increased danger to pedestrians... I live in the city, they in the suburbs. It's not that they are uncaring (well, not directly) it is just that for many people, imagining a lifestyle different from theirs is very difficult.
I'm convinced that North America will only get its act together when gasoline reaches $9.00/gal. Only then will middle class folks start looking toward city living and only then will we get any appreciable progress in city life. I only hope that we reach that point BEFORE the climate catastrophe worsens beyond repair. The fracking boom doesn't have me very confident of this.
> I'm convinced that North America will only get its act together when gasoline reaches $9.00/gal.
What if North America successfully moves from petrol-powered cars to electric ones, and autonomous vehicles get rolled out, and in the end the sprawling development and the reliance on vehicles remains just as entrenched?
You sound frustrated that you couldn't convince your friend of something so obvious. But you realize most people are both pedestrians and motorists, and still overwhelmingly prefer right on red.
I live in Columbia, SC -- a place that is surprisingly pedestrian-friendly but where there is little awareness of this. I walk to most places I go -- decidedly unusual here.
I would actually defend right-on-red. Indeed, when I do drive, I get annoyed by all the "no turn on red" signs which slow things down.
In my estimation, the problem (locally, anyway) is cultural: drivers don't think to look, or else they feel entitled to turn first even if I'm crossing already and they think they can squeeze by faster. Convince these drivers to care about pedestrians, and to yield when legally required to, and you've solved the problem.
2. Right turn, green for car, green for pedestrian.
3. Right turn, green for car, red for pedestrian.
In USA, in some states the car driving in situation 1 is allowed (and naturally 2). I assume in most states 1 is not allowed and 2 is allowed.
In Europe, I assume driving the car in situation 1 is not allowed anywhere. 2 is mixed, some places have traffic lights that create this green for both, some don't.
I find it baffling that anyone would ever create a crossing where situation 2 is possible. A crossing which can indicate it’s safe to cross while the associate lights are also saying a car can proceed through it is worse than useless. Just remove it and then at least pedestrians will know that they need to be paying particular attention.
Ok, I'll just repeat the GP here but... Why not just remove the pedestrian light on those places? It's not improving anything. Is there some law against car-only lights?
I also still find it kind of odd, but it's not like the light is doing nothing.
Typically, at least here in Germany, a crossing cycles between two states:
* Cars can go north/south, pedestrians can cross the east and west roads
* Cars can go east/west, pedestrians can cross the north and south roads.
The key thing here is that pedestrians don't cross the "active" direction, i.e. when cars are going in a straight line from south to north, they will never run into a pedestrian crossing the road in front of them. This is ideal, because cars going in a straight direction tend to go quickly, so we want to alternate fast cars and pedestrians.
However, obviously cars don't just go north and south, sometimes they turn. To turn, the car naturally needs to slow down, and also typically be more aware of their surroundings. Theoretically, this means that they are a lot more likely to see, and be able to stop for, a pedestrian crossing the road as they turn.
The argument then goes that this group of cars is slow and aware enough that they can share a stretch of road with pedestrians (unlike fast cars traveling in a straight line, which must not share a stretch of road with pedestrians). Which means that you could allow pedestrians to cross if (and only if) the cars that they would intersect with are slow, turning cars. The advantage is that you go from three states in the cycle (cars N/S, cars E/W, all pedestrians) to two (cars N/S + pedestrians E/W, cars E/W + pedestrians N/S), which improves throughput because fewer people need to wait.
In practice, this works for relatively small junctions with one or possibly two lanes, but three+ lanes become more complicated and need more states to handle the cars going left and right from different directions. But there is a thought process here about trying to find the right balance between safety and efficiency. As someone from the UK, I'm not sure I'm a fan, but some of that might just be not being used to it.
The two times I’ve seen pedestrians hit by cars it was the #2 situation and they had the walk signal. One of them was me hit by an actual police car. Wasn’t hurt except for a sprained wrist, I did the whole roll over the hood and off the other side thing though. Pretty embarrassing, I got up and told the officer I was fine and left (late to a conf call at work) sometimes I wish I was hurt just a little bit more. The settlement check would have been nice heh.
As a pedestrian and car hater I don't mind that too much. Pedestrians always have priority on the walk signal, and there is a special separate light to allow/disallow cars to turn. In practice they are used where it's safe to implement.
But I may be wrong - statistics seem to agree with you.
Not sure about Britain and Denmark, but in France, Belgium and the Netherlands there's a difference if the traffic light for cars is an arrow or just a disc.
If it's an arrow, cars have priority and don't have to worry about other traffic getting in their way. It's mostly for left turns (a green left arrow indicates that traffic coming in front has a red light) but it also works for pedestrians, a right arrow means that pedestrians and bicycles have red lights.
If it's a disc, then cars should pay attention to other traffic and observe regular priority rules, so stop for pedestrians and bicycles that likely have a green light at the same time as the cars do.
For pedestrians and bicycles, a green light basically means they always have priority and cars must stop for them wherever they come from.
I served on a civil jury where a police officer insisted in his testimony that drivers only have to look left when they enter a one way street from the right because “that’s where the traffic is coming from.”
I thought this was a weird statement for him to be allowed to make because a) he was a fact witness and that ain’t a fact and b) he was the officer who responded to the scene where he encountered a bicyclist trapped under a hummer… which was turning into a one way street as the bicyclist approached from the right.
For decades in Boston, many lights were programmed to send cars through active crosswalks on left turns. In some cases, the only place for a car to go on green was through an active crosswalk. Maybe the worst examples have been ended over the years[1] but "concurrent signaling" has been an absurd signature of callous safety-hostile traffic design right up until this year.
"Turns on red are extremely dangerous to vulnerable road users: a 1980 Insurance Institute of Highway Safety study found that they increase pedestrian crashes by 60 percent, and bicycle crashes by 100 percent." [2]
Depends on a country. In Poland, if the light is plain green for cars, it can be also green for pedestrians if you turn left or right, so you need to watch out for pedestrians and other traffic as a driver.
If the light is directional left/right, it means everyone else has a red light.
> In the US the pedestrian is expected to run the gauntlet
Technically, in most of the US, if a pedestrian looks like they're wanting to cross the street at a corner, that legally makes it a crosswalk whether it's marked as such or not (excepting for ones that have a sign indicating that there is no pedestrian crossing allowed). Failing to stop to allow the pedestrian to cross is an infraction and you can be ticketed for it.
Practically speaking, though, you're correct.
> that's in one of the more pedestrian friendly cities in the country, San Francisco.
Wait, what? San Francisco is considered a pedestrian-friendly city? That seriously boggles my mind. I mean, there are certainly cities that are worse, but there are also plenty of cities that are better.
> hoping that turning cars will see you and not mow you down. Pretty sure this is what is going to kill me
I saw an accident in front of my eyes where this played out - a turning car mowed an elderly couple crossing slowly with the help of walking sticks. It was not pretty.
Notably this is a cultural and sentencing problem. Killing pedestrians in a crosswalk should be vehicular manslaughter with serious prison time attached.
Perpetrators tend to be let off easily for cultural reasons. That's the real problem that needs to be addressed.
Drivers will respect pedestrians when the law is evenly enforced
> In Europe cars are not allowed to drive through the crossing on the "walk" signal
They are. When you turn right on your green, the pedestrians have a green light. They have priority of course but then you are free to cross the crossing on their green.
yeah I'm a little confused because practically all crosswalks in Chicago no longer have beg buttons. Maybe this wasn't true in 2015. This might be one across Lake Shore Drive, at Monroe perhaps (https://www.google.com/maps/@41.8810438,-87.6172572,3a,75y,2...)? That does have a beg button but despite living a few blocks from there, I'm not sure if it does anything or not...
> In less dense areas, buttons should change the light more or less immediately to allow pedestrian crossing
I second this.
As a pedestrian it's pointless to have to wait when there were no other pedestrians crossing shortly before me and there won't be any shortly after me.
As a driver it's infuriating to have to stop at an empty crossing because the pedestrians eventually crossed during a short gap between the cars when they got tired waiting.
Some Dutch crosswalks give pedestrians always green, unless a car is detected, and then the pedestrian light turns red and the car gets green.
The advantage of this is that it's pretty easy to detect cars by detection loops in the road, and if you detect them in time, the car doesn't even have to slow down. Unless there are too many of them; then they will sometimes have to wait for pedestrians to cross.
I don't quite understand what the flags in Bellevue are for. Are there no traffic lights? But then what are the crosswalk buttons for?
> I don't quite understand what the flags in Bellevue are for. Are there no traffic lights? But then what are the crosswalk buttons for?
It is a cheap non solution that allows leaders to say they did something without actually doing something that would require a sacrifice, such as money, or in the case, sacrificing the convenience of drivers who are presumably more politically powerfully than pedestrians.
I get that, but it doesn't answer my question. Is there a crosswalk button without traffic lights? Are there lights but you still need to carry a flag? What exactly are the function of the button and the flag in this setup?
Presumably, the flag is to increase the visibility of a pedestrian to increase the probability that a driver notices them.
The crosswalk buttons work, the traffic lights turn red, but that does not mean a driver will pay attention and check for pedestrians.
Right turns on red lights are allowed. As are left turns on greens, while the walk signal will simultaneously tell a person they can walk across the road. In both cases, the traffic light does not stop the driver, the driver has to be actively checking for a pedestrian.
The crosswalk with the flags does not have a light, just a crosswalk, so cars will drive without slowing down unless a pedestrian is present. The flags simply make the pedestrian more obvious to the motorists. In other areas I've seen crosswalks with buttons that will flash lights to alter motorists.
All of this absurdity could be solved with a simple stop sign, but that would be a minor inconvenience to motorists.
Beg buttons (aka crosswalk buttons) in pedestrian-heavy areas should be green to pedestrians, red to drivers by default. Drivers should roll the windows down, and press the beg button and wait for their turn. Cities are for people first, not machines· If they can roll their windows down in drive-ins, they can role to beg for permission to cross.
Detecting a cars arrival at an intersection has been a solved engineering problem for many decades (pressure plates 60+ years ago, induction loops today). It’s a much harder problem for a 150lb pedestrian with a small footprint who isn’t magnetic. The other challenge with induction loops is for cyclists on higher end bikes with carbon frames/rims.
Enough of subsidizing fancy tech to for drivers convenience. Taxpayer should not pay for drivers not to have to open their windows. If they can't roll down their windows, then they should not be driving.
I was to Seattle and coming from Mexico where most streets you just cross without cars stopping for you, I somehow felt more oppressed by cars in the US. Even when the crossing is active for you, you still have to compete with turning cars.
Also, unprotected left turns are just crazy dangerous.
Saving the planet. Pedestrians use lot less fuel or energy to accelerate and deaccelerate. As such it is best in fight against climate change to not force them to stop.
I always hit all crosswalk buttons, even if I'm not crossing, because it's nonsense that pedestrians have to ask permission to cross the street while the lights always change for drivers.
The world will be fair when drivers have to get out of their cars and push a button to get a green light, while pedestrians automatically get a walk signal every cycle.
After 50 years of that it'll be even, and we can go to a system where everyone gets their turn automatically.
I agree with you in principle, but pressing the button eagerly like that can have downsides. You press the button, the pedestrian light goes green, then somebody walking 100 meters behind you who actually wants to cross just misses the light and has to wait longer.
The only unambiguous win (I think) would be for the light to change immediately when you press the button, with the throttling delay afterwards, as a few others have said in this thread.
I wish I knew whether traffic signal designers intentionally don't use that design, or whether it simply doesn't occur to them. (Or is there some downside to that design?)
The problem with crosswalks in North America is primarily cultural…
If a driver sees me walking in the crosswalk and notices that our paths will intersect, he speeds up.
Everyone does it and everyone accepts the behavior —- it has become so ingrained within driving culture that no one questions how insane it is to try to speed past a guy pushing a stroller to shave six seconds off of a trip.
Of course, people respond to incentives, so we shouldn’t blame individuals for operating within the constraints they inherited. Traffic calming is the way to fix this problem but as long as we as a culture never ask drivers to make trade offs for pedestrians, we will always be stuck driving everywhere and forcing people to ask permission to cross the road.
The problem with the button is this - too many intersections are built for cars and not people. The car is there “by default” and the pedestrian must ask permission to enter their realm. If there is a place which requires pedestrians to ask permission to enter a road which is dominated by fast moving cars…something has gone very wrong.
> If a driver sees me walking in the crosswalk and notices that our paths will intersect, he speeds up. Everyone does it and everyone accepts the behavior
It's a weird experience reading this about something I've never done nor really observed very often. People speed up when they see a pedestrian in a crosswalk? I see people stopping for pedestrians all the time. Sometimes cars will stop for me when I wish they wouldn't: just keep going, you were fine, I'm still like 5 seconds away from your path.
> The car is there “by default” and the pedestrian must ask permission to enter their realm
That's such a weirdly negative way of looking at the world. Dozens to hundreds of cars pass per minute and fewer than one pedestrian does (on average), so the pedestrian notifies the intersection that they're there. You'd rather every single light cycle assume pedestrians are crossing, even when 95% of the time they're not? You'd like to waste every driver's time to make some point about society?
There are plenty of intersections where a very minor road crosses a main road. When cars come to the intersection on the minor road, they "hit the button" by driving over the sensor, and the intersection knows they're there. Are they the poor pathetic outsiders "asking for permission" to "enter the realm" of the major street? I guess you could look at it that way if you wanted to be angry all the time. It's just simple optimization to make as many people as happy as possible. Just hit the damn walk button; it's fine.
Agreed, I've literally never seen anyone speed up to try to get through before I cross. Hell, often times at stop signs if I notice a car or two coming, I try to stand away from the sign to let them go before crossing, and yet still they often stop and gesture for me to cross first.
I haven't gotten around to learning to drive yet (didn't think I could afford it on a PhD stipend, but turns out I can, so working on it now), so I'm always on foot and always dealing with the half-baked public transport.
It’s not that _everyone_ always speeds up…I was exaggerating to communicate what it feels like.
Yes, many drivers try to be courteous.
But many others are drag racing at 75 mph on a 35 mph road while I try to walk across with my child in the middle of the afternoon - an anecdote which is not exaggerated at all.
Don't exaggerate a stat like that. Speak rationally and use information, not hyperbole as there is no /h tag to show how you are making exaggerated statements or claims not meant to be taken literally.
I’m sure you don’t see it often but I see “speed up to pass pedestrian” at least weekly where I live. And I am angry at the fact that pedestrian deaths were up 77% from 2020 to 2021 - a year in which 7000+ drivers unintentionally smashed their cars into people walking and ended their lives. I think there’s room for negativity on this point.
(That said, I’m certainly not angry at you…just the system.)
But I don’t want to waste all of societies time waiting at pointless walk stoppages…that would be absurd and it wasn’t my point.
I believe that walk buttons are a symptom of a problem - specifically that there are lots of places which try to mix pedestrians and cars and end up being worse for both.
In my mind, we need more roads specifically dedicated to _only_ cars which offer no possibility of encountering a pedestrian at all. Interstates have no crossing buttons.
And at the same time, we need more spaces which are designed to let cars pass slowly through them, where people tend to walk, bike, scooter, and crawl. These spaces need no crossing buttons either.
I don't see the "speed up" problem but I get the "I have no idea if you intend to stop, or turn directly into me".
These people drive with speed right up the stop sign, don't turn their blinkers on, and then with 40% probability, turn anyway. So whenever I get to that intersection, if I see a car approaching there, even if they don't have their blinker on to indicate they might want to turn where I want to walk, I wait to make sure they come to a complete stop before I enter the intersection. Sometimes the buggers will just start turning slowly into the intersection as I'm still walking. It's extra great when they start blocking cars going the other way.
Shortly after moving to Mountain View I was walking home from work and distracted thinking about a technical problem, I managed to walk right in front of a car that had the green. They stopped and apologized to me! (I assume they were also somewhat distracted and thought they were at fault...) Very different experience from the east coast.
I don't recall anyone in norcal speeding up towards pedestrians. And on bikes at unprotected crossings and in merging cars I've experienced the opposite problem where everyone slows down, spacing out traffic to optimally make it so you don't get a break long enough to allow crossing.
I’m in Columbia, SC. The truth is that some of the most dangerous places I walk are usually dominated by poor pedestrians who often don’t follow traffic laws.
I think that has contributed to an especially bad micro-culture around a few blocks where people just get used to weaving their car in between rather annoying pedestrians.
I’ll never forget one day when I was in Sweden trying to cross a road. A driver stopped for me to cross and I was so surprised it actually changed what I expect of myself when near pedestrians.
> If a driver sees me walking in the crosswalk and notices that our paths will intersect, he speeds up.
I've lived in the US all my life and I don't recall seeing this even once.
On the other hand, the thing I experience that infuriates me is when the walk sign comes on so I start to step off the curb to cross and a car making a right turn at my corner of the intersection doesn't even pretend to check for pedestrians and comes barreling through the corner because they were trying to beat the red light.
Most of the time they see me at the last second and stop before running me over. I make a point of quickly stepping back on to curb and giving them a death stare before I continue.
Sometimes they don't see me and barrel through the corner. If I don't step back, I would get run over. Infuriating.
That's really weird to attribute it to North America. I find the norms are different pretty much everywhere I've been. East Coast, Midwest, West Coast, city vs suburb.
In some places the pedestrians ALWAYS have the right of way (cars going 40-50 mph will stop for pedestrian crossing). In other places, cars slowly force their way into a full crosswalk.
Yes, it's cultural. But it's different everywhere in the US.
Only took a couple paragraphs in to make me realize this is one of the dumbest posts I've read on HN all year. At least I enjoyed reading people vent about the dismal state of pedestrian rights in the comments!
Perhaps the button could be turned into a fake button that does nothing, then the crossings should be automated based on actual data of pedestrian traffic. There's fake/placebo buttons all around us anyway, so the users won't know any difference.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 277 ms ] thread..... CTRL F5
Elacceleration: hitting the elevator call button repeatedly to make the elevator arrive faster.
It could still be a, “hey, press the button” light. Or it could be a “button already pressed” light
Our cities have way over optimized for traffic flow of cars.
Edit: Also, I think crosswalks should be signalized away from intersections with level crossing and dedicated walking paths separate from road noise/pollution. Making people cross at an intersection is way too dangerous.
Meanwhile, I have not seen this behavior anywhere else in the city where it would make sense. Instead, we have almost all crosswalk buttons that do nothing, a few that turn on a light so drivers can know you want to cross (they won't stop, but they'll know), and a few where you will never have a walk signal unless you hit the button, but the light timing does not change. I have watched plenty of tourists helplessly trapped at an intersection not knowing why it never changes.
0: trains which cannot stop 1: emergency vehicles working a current emergency (when an emergency is not in progress they are 5) 2: pedestrians on foot (including manual wheelchairs) 3: buses in a bus-only lane 4: bicycles and other human powered wheeled transport (ebike count only if most power comes from humans). This includes electric wheelchairs. 5: everything else. Including buses in mixed traffic (which should only be done when traffic is so light that it doesn't matter)
This encourages the type of transport you want people to use in your city.
Suburban intersections really need them and I wouldn't consider them 'the most remote' ... the intersections are large enough that most people can't or won't cross on a minimum length green, so the button lengthens the green time. Additionally, traffic patterns vary, and waiting for a car to trigger the occupancy signal might be a longer wait, and anyway to encourage pedestrianism (false positives from people jumping out of cars isn't that big of a deal in the scheme of things either), the beg button often reduces cycle times to minimums until the pedestrian can cross. The alternative of including pedestrians in all cycles by default is a waste of everyone's time, including pedestrians, given the low pedestrian usage.
Maybe if there was a good way to measure pedestrians on approach and intersection entrance, you could do the same thing you do for cars, and cycle in advance of their arrival and confirm they cleared the intersection before cycling further, but that's asking for a lot.
In remote intersections, you only really need a button if there's significant traffic. Otherwise, crossing whenever there's a clearing is probably better, IMHO. But a button for slow crossers isn't a bad idea.
That's only safe if there are a reasonable number of lanes, namely no more than 2. Beyond that the width is higher, the possibility of a car far away blocking the view of another car slightly behind increases and the driving speed of the cars is increased because it feels safe enough for them. And from what I've seen in the West Coast, narrow human-sized roads are reserved exclusively for back alleys.
I still will hit the yellow bit, but I'm not sure if I need to, or if they are totally automated*. There is absolutely zero feedback, not even the feedback of pushing a button.
British road-crossings often will illuminate a 'WAIT' message on the box when the button has been pressed, which is some great feedback.
(* there is a rotating part on the bottom which gives partially sighted people an indication that the lights are green).
Some in the US (maybe when I was in DC?) will audibly say "WAIT" from when they're pressed until you can cross, sometimes also counting the time remaining out loud after you get the signal, too.
I prefer the version of it I encountered in Hong Kong; there is a rapid clip of clicks at green, followed by a slower click when flashing red, and then a slow click at red. It's more universal and language-agnostic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnWRQ9yVFYg&t=13s
The sounds are highly directed so you can't hear, say, the crosswalk perpendicular to you, let alone hear it from surrounding buildings.
Unless you are deaf, then you get no feedback. There are buttons near me that don't always trigger when I touch them, but I know to listen for the feedback. (these are touch, not push buttons) Of course they are not universal, there are a lot of buttons around me that give no feedback at all.
In any case the buttons often vibrate specifically so that deaf people can feel it.
The person you've constructed in this scenario is both blind and deaf. Such an unattended person is in extreme danger on streets with automobile traffic no matter what the crosswalk button does.
I agree that not all disabilities can be accounted for. However the more we account for the better - where accounting is all aspects of getting around. I don't know how to make it safe for a blind and deaf person to navigate streets safely - but I wish it was possible and as soon as I learn of something that works I'll support it.
At some point, a disability requires assistance. That is less true these days than in the past but still a last option.
It’s a simple button that clicks, and under the panel there’s a small knob that rotates. Click the button, then place your fingers on the knob and wait for it to start spinning. I can’t tell you if the crossing call button is completely broken (although you’ll figure that out if wait long enough), but broken call buttons in the UK are pretty rare, I’ve only encountered a small handful of broken buttons over 20 years.
I am most used to these ones specifically: https://c8.alamy.com/comp/ECW0FA/pedestrian-crossing-traffic...
Can be activated with your elbow, the thing beeps and the bottom lights up when you activate it.
Slow clicks help deaf users locate the button; fast clicks mean it's safe to cross; silence means you shouldn't enter the crossing because there's not enough time left.
[0] See https://theconversation.com/sublime-design-the-pb-5-pedestri...: I have a possibly excessive national pride in how good a button it is
I absolutely detest the lip variant. It makes it impossible to slap the button with an open palm, requiring an actual push instead. Particularly with the pandemic, they were near impossible to activate with an elbow. So close to perfection and yet so far…
That said I now have to deal with the terrible British ones, and the attached signals that are supposedly safer - they’re on the same device as the button, supposedly forcing you to look at them and face the traffic. In practise, the inconsistency of whether there’s a crossing indicator on the other side of the road or not means I rely solely on sound cues.
If everyone can just adopt the PB/5, even with the atrocious lip, the world will be a better place.
WAIT…WAIT… WAI-WA-WAITWAITWAIT…
…CROSS SIGNAL IS ON…
BEEP… BEEP… BEEP… BEEP
The other one, with the hand symbol, means you only need to hover your hand near it and it registers your intent. No touch necessary.
For all the hate the bureaucracy and infrastructure in Berlin gets, the design of it at least does have some thought put into it.
[1] https://www.absv.de/die-blindenampel
They also don't vibrate or give any auditory signal (except when the actual green walk signal comes)... I'm not sure how a blind person could use it because their sensitivity is so low that you have to keep touching, pressing, smacking the touch surface until it registers you and updates the (purely visual) signal on the other side. I ended up just crossing illegally at one crosswalk because the damn thing just wouldn't work.
If they don't have the three dots in the circle they usually do control the lights. Newer models also show a red light on the side of the button when pressed, similar to the UK lights just more subtle. But there are also plenty of old buttons around that don't.
IIRC if it has three dots, it's for accessibility only - you don't need to press it.
If it has the vague hand symbol, it will probably light up when you "tap" it, but may not actually do anything you notice - one near us it doesn't speed up the light, it just makes it last longer. But for others it might also be necessary to tap it to make the light change!
Only thanks to Covid and not wanting to touch things did I find out it did nothing
In other countries I find the lack of feedback quite frustrating.
(took me a long time to figure that out)
In the end, it is a like a secret button only the locals know about :)
If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, that's the likeliest explanation. You can always help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: also, please don't take HN threads further into flamewar! as you did below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38477500. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Antagonizing people who are using a different mode of transportation at the moment does not seem helpful at all. You may even cause other people to become accustomed to seeing crosswalk signals activated for no reason, reducing their attentiveness and increasing the risk of injury to people actually crossing the road.
The history of such laws are interesting, by the way.
That said, most of the time and in most places I've been, the de facto reality is that it's essentially lawless. Neither pedestrians nor drivers are being policed effectively and they all kind of do whatever.
Since you're comfortable asking pedestrians to jaywalk across the street if it looks clear, maybe you should also get comfortable with simply running the red lights on these quiet roads, since nothing is coming. At least in your case, you have a giant machine with airbags to protect you if you make a mistake.
According to the rest of his comment, most of them are jaywalking:
> Most of the time they then cross immediately and the traffic light will go red some time after they have already crossed
I.e., they come to the intersection, hit the crosswalk button, and then jaywalk across instead of waiting for the signal to change. The signal then actually changes after they are across.
I do not have a car. It is while walking that I am affected by the behaviour.
This article cites the murder of Kitty Genovese as an example of the bystander effect / volunteer's dilemma. More recent research, including a documentary by Kitty's brother who interviews witnesses (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3568002/), has shown that the police report and subsequent newspaper reporting of 37 witnesses doing nothing is completely wrong. See https://www.npr.org/2014/03/03/284002294/what-really-happene... and https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/03/10/a-call-for-hel... .
The New York Times has updated their original article acknowledging it's incorrect (https://web.archive.org/web/20181108183955/https://www.nytim...)
"A.M. Rosenthal, who went on to become executive editor of The Times, stands by the article he assigned to Mr. Gansberg 40 years ago, right down to the word ''watched'' in its opening sentence. This questioning of details, he said, is to be expected.
''In a story that gets a lot of attention, there's always somebody who's saying, 'Well, that's not really what it's supposed to be,''' said Mr. Rosenthal, who is retired from The Times and now writes a column for The Daily News. There may have been minor inaccuracies, he allows, but none that alter the story's essential meaning. ''There may have been 38, there may have been 39,'' he said, ''but the whole picture, as I saw it, was very affecting.''"
Does that sound like "completely wrong" to you?
So yes
Sounds like lies to me.
Note that I said lights - plural. People should cross diagonally across the intersection if that is where their direction takes them.
That seems fair, though? That's a pretty long crossing if you include the sidewalk in the grassy area as part of one continuous crossing. If it were a median, I'd agree with you, but that's almost a small park. Just plain grass, it could use some shrubs & trees, but still.
The parking spots were probably just opportunistic use of the extra space. They seem have been removed, if you look on street view. The satellite view is from 2019 or before, but some of the street views are 2020 and 2021 and show that they've removed the parking and added road capacity.
For street crossings with multiple directions and multiple lights, that behavior makes sense. You’re waiting for the next pre-programmed phase that syncs you up with other parts of the crossing. For large roads it might make sense, you don’t want to interrupt the flow of the traffic that is expected to hit a green light down the road at current speed.
But for the lonely crossing light in front of the school building in a small street, why do I have to wait 20 seconds after pushing it, every single time?
Are you waiting 20 seconds for the cross light to turn amber or 20 seconds for your walk light to come on? Because the latter is always going to take at least ~10 seconds -- the stale green time + the amber time + all-red time.
In Amsterdam, every single intersection I encountered changed in less than 5 seconds, some almost immediately.
This is just a choice we make.
They're not traffic signals, though, they are a dozen or so strobing yellow lights. It's effectively a red light based on local law, but it's way more noticeable for approaching traffic.
Some crosswalks are configured to respect the button press, but in my experience the vast majority don't have any effect whatsoever.
There’s a pervasive myth about elevator buttons and crosswalk buttons being there as placebos. Yes, I’m certain there are instances where—when the traffic lights regularly cycle all day long—they might be placebo buttons, but the vast majority of them will at least lengthen the cycle time for your direction, and if appropriate will trigger a change sooner than it would have occurred otherwise.
I've timed it. It does nothing.
The elevator button thing is not a myth, it's actually quite common. As is crosswalk buttons that do nothing.
As far as crosswalks go: Yeah, on major intersections where light cycling is guaranteed to happen all day, the button may not accelerate the change. But that doesn't apply to "lonely crosswalks", and I bet that same button will work in the middle of the night if the cross-street happens to die off during those hours. I caveated that in my comment.
There is no cool-down period on how frequently it can trigger, and there is no platooning, so at the end of the day when everyone is going home, intermittent pedestrian traffic, say, one person every 20 seconds, is enough to back traffic up all the way to the end of the canyon.
A simple bit of platooning, or a traffic detector (loops aren't good in the canyons, plows rip em up, so probably a radar based approach), would solve this, for this case at least
So traffic engineers by default set crossing buttons to have a delay so the poor motorists aren't somehow inconvenienced by a person wanting to cross.
Note that I'm not referring to lights where pushing the button inserts a crosswalk cycle into the next light change. I'm talking about single street crossings where you push the button and nothing happens for anywhere from 30 seconds to minutes.
The ones in my part of the US do this when the traffic is light or nonexistent, but only with the streets that have car sensors embedded in them.
I think they're mainly a UK/Ireland thing, which confused the hell out of me when I went to continental europe and saw the same road markings paired with actual traffic lights + button. (here, that'd be a "pelican crossing" and have different road markings)
The versions that I hate are where there are always flashing yellow lights at those whether there is a pedestrian present or not. It is confusing and teaches people to ignore the flashing light as it is meaningless. I prefer the kind where a pedestrian presses a button and the lights flash to tell the cars to stop.
They do exactly what you're proposing here in the UK (at least, the ones that have been recently upgraded in the town I live do) - if there's no cars around it'll instantly cycle the road lights to red (via amber) and then the pedestrian crossing goes green. Pretty much inside the 3 seconds requested too.
Even the ones with multiple directions. No cars? Ped can go as soon as the road lights are red.
The traffic light system before these upgrades was locked into the same cycle you describe - pressing the button would just add a "pedestrians can go now" phase into the normal light pattern.
Having said all that if there's no cars around I'll just cross the road without interacting with the traffic lights at all lol
There's a particularly bad one at a busy foot and cycle path near me. It takes a minute to cross after pressing at all times. I know it's done to ease congestion on the busy road but that's wrong. Congestion should be allowed but only the participants (car users) subjected to it. Otherwise it's just making cars more enjoyable at everyone else's expense.
I usually encounter this when a line of cars go through their green and I dash across behind them quick enough for it to unset and not disrupt the normal light cycles. It's a daft little thing but it feels so darn efficient to get across without interrupting traffic, haha
Sometimes Occam's razor[0] provides a satisfactory explanation:
Traffic engineers have to take into account people pressing a request button at an arbitrary point in time, or with high frequency, which can cause significant negative impact to traffic flow if a minimum is not enforced.
While a person, or relatively small set of people, seeking to cross a street is made to wait, the numerous people driving are kept moving such that traffic back pressure can be minimized.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor
This approach would not satisfy the very real use-case scenario of pedestrians pressing the request button whilst having no intention to cross.
By having a "request -> delay -> satisfy" workflow, instead of a "request -> satisfy -> delay" one, traffic engineers can at least minimize the impact of random jerks.
I did, for the purpose of presenting a context to try to explore the original question:
>> Seems a good place to ask a question I’ve been asking myself for a long time, and couldn’t figure out the answer to: why do lonely crosswalks not immediately turn the lights red for the cars when you push the button? Or at least, after a very short delay (< 3 seconds).
Just because a pedestrian desires to reach their destination by crossing a road does not negate the desires of those driving to reach their destinations. Neither desire is more important than the other and a legitimate case can be made for slightly prioritizing drivers due to the volume of people involved.
> ... the designer has to deliberately forget that you can put the delay after the cycle.
That choice would prioritize one person, or at most a few, over those in vehicles having the same desire. Plus, it does not factor in impact with regard to other traffic control devices (a.k.a. "stop lights").
I guess the fundamental question is; does the want of one person outweigh those of others if that "one person" happens to be you?
I disagree.
The flow of cars is (roughly) continuous, and the button presses are (roughly) randomly timed. Adding a delay to the button does not affect the experience of the cars. They still see a randomly timed red light. Even if there was an hour-long delay (with multiple pushes in flight), that wouldn't prioritize cars in any meaningful way. They'd still see the light change every 2-10 minutes or whatever it is, and whether they are caught by the light will still be random.
So it might as well change right away.
In a place I used to live there was an very low traffic intersection on a road between my office and my home where the light was misprogrammed or had a bad trigger and would consistently take many minutes before switching to one direction (the direction between my home and office). But hitting the crosswalk to cross the perpendicular road would make it turn green (and the always-green direction red) in seconds. I believe the button instantly set the light to yellow, so the only delay was the yellow time.
So if my partner was with me she'd always hop out and hit the button. :P
Of course, perhaps discouraging that behavior is a reason they aren't usually fast like that. :)
You don't have to, just cross the street and ignore the "criminalisation" of said basic action (i.e. crossing an empty street) as "jay-walking".
I can say it's very interesting to see what people from several places consider common on this thread. Most traffic laws seem to be absolutely insane; I wonder insanity there are on my local laws that I'm too used to notice.
Even in a place like California where pedestrians supposedly have the right-of-way, it would encourage more walking if we try not to make it an inconvenience.
The crosswalk button scenario is therefore not comparable; there's no cost (to the button-pusher) in pressing the button, even if they aren't planning to cross at all.
downsides:
- inconvenience (like if my hands are in my pocket)
- exposure to illness transmission via increased contact with unknown but certainly dirty surface area (assuming touch is required)
- energy expenditure (if its not immediately next to you, or you have a disability)
Sincerely, you might be on to something here.
You're going to touch traces of a million other people's gender fluids on every single other thing you touch during your errand. Germophobia is very selective.
Are your fingers OK?
:)
In Australia, they all do have big buttons.
This works fine 99% of the time. However, sometimes my wife will be there. She never presses the button (because she’s ADHD and always forgets), but stands nice and close. A pile of pedestrians will mill around, the lights will change, and the walk signal will stay red! Someone will then annoyedly step in and press the button approximately 20 times while everyone waits for another light cycle to complete.
Her other trick is to enter an elevator and press no buttons. Eventually the lift will go somewhere, but she is often surprised at the destination!
Also, my wife is the same.
- Please press
- Wait for green
At least that's the way it is here in NZ, and when I've been in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane I haven't obviously noticed a general difference to here in NZ (there are particular crossings that are sometimes a bit different, i.e. you never need to press, but)...
Feedback would obviously solve (or at least alleviate) the problem I mentioned. It would, however, be much less amusing.
[0]: https://theconversation.com/sublime-design-the-pb-5-pedestri...
However others have no indicator or sound. To make things even more confusing is the pedestrian crossings can also be programmed to happen automatically at peak times with no button press, but absolutely need a button press outside of peak hour.
https://youtu.be/QUg1t-JfAyY?si=pIiq2--f7WfkKYMG
Yeah, it's not much. In any other circumstance I press the dang button.
I recently visited Bellevue, WA and experienced one of the most anti-pedestrian "walking streets" I have ever encountered. Crosswalk buttons on a busy street full of shops and restaurants, yes, but even worse were the orange flags left out for pedestrians to grab and use like they are part-time crossing guards. No stop signs. No speed bumps. Just orange flags for the suckers walking instead of driving. To add insult to injury, the flags always ended up on one side of the street, making the entire project half-broken at best.
The worst part: this is their literal Main Street.
I'm not sure I understand the reasoning for this. If a car approaches a less-busy intersection it triggers the lights to cycle, but not immediately. I'm not sure why pedestrians would get such priority, rather being placed into the natural cycle.
FWIW I just came back from Thailand and it was rather eye opening - crosswalks are ignored by motorists, and there's much less hand-holding, but people manage to get by. There's more give-and-take rather than rigid rule following.
You might think so, until you look up the accident rates. https://www.roadsafetyfacility.org/country/thailand
This setup as I understand is preferred because it aligns with their modal priorities, and it is easier and more reliable to detect a heavy metal car than a person or a bicycle.
New York though... so often I'm crossing on green and there's some truck edging round the corner into my path, driver making eye contact, daring me to try to make him stop.
Keep the button, but for goodness sake stop letting cars drive through crosswalks in the "walk" phase.
I live in NY now and though the traffic laws are roughly the same, I almost never fear for my safety when crossing like I regularly did in SF.
While you’re asking for better pedestrian infrastructure, consider asking for protected bike lanes as well.
No right turns on red is a huge improvement. Don't the five boroughs have that?
It would be so much safer to do a pedestrian scramble. There aren’t a lot of pedestrians at this intersection, maybe one every 4-5 cycles, so it’s not going to slow traffic much if at all to have a 30-45second dedicated time where we can walk all the way across.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/11/27/a-pedestrian-...
I think that author likes to make up words, like "Stroad".
I regularly see 4+ year-olds sitting in a stroller playing phone games or just looking bored and disengaged, while the adult pushing the stroller otherwise completely ignores them, and it always makes me cringe.
One thing I've noticed, they don't walk very well while taking a nap. And you just get so much more out of a day when you don't have to return home in the middle.
There is a pretty big difference between using a stroller to help get a toddler (less than 5 years old) around and using it to pacify a 5 year old. In my experience, somewhere between 4 and 5 is when I expect them to be able to walk at a sufficient pace and distance to never need strollers.
Not Just Bikes popularized it (I think) https://youtu.be/ORzNZUeUHAM
It is a well accepted phrase too: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedestrian_scramble
There are many references since the 2010s, but i also found references to it in a 1955 traffic engineering book: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Sqh-alGvdoYC&q=%22pedest...
I don’t get the sense from “scramble” that the pedestrians would not know where they are going. Scramble can mean a sudden act of motion, like “they scrambled the jets” or “once we have stopped we all scrambled off the coach”.
There is an alternative meaning where it is used to signify that something is intentionally mixed up or even encrypted, such as “scrambled egg” or “can’t intercept their plans anymore, they scrambled the signal”. Maybe that is the meaning you are thinking about?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroad
You can ignore new terms if you wish, but it is useful for describing a common street pattern in North America. The term is increasingly being used by urban planners.
The only people who use that word are insufferable choads who want me to give up my car and live in a tiny apartment because of their misguided belief that if everyone lived like they do in Manhattan global warming would end and the world would be a Utopia
"Stroad" is a shibboleth that tells me you're someone with an opinion that is not worthwhile
Street example[1]: a road in a city or town that has buildings that are usually close together along one or both sides
Road example[2]: a long, hard surface built for vehicles to travel along
A street in this case is a type of road. A stroad is another type of road (where buildings are not “close together”, f.ex.)
1: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/street
2: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/road
Sounds like Naples
This goes for us in Canada too. I tell my kids to "be quick or be dead, but be safe". Probably kind of morbid, but an intersection is not a place to hang out.
Sarcasm?
And I say this as a pedestrian, I walk to work. And I am afraid of getting hit every day but for a different reason. The crosswalks are in the stupidest friggin spots, around a bend in the road, and cars are apparently allowed to park right up against the crosswalk so if even want a hope in hell of being seen you have to walk part way onto the road, and peak your head around the van that's blocking the view for both you and oncoming cars, and then hope they can see you around the bend in the road.
European here. What is the reason that this is allowed?
Although that's the same in Europe, if you turn right on green you usually have to be aware of a green pedestrian light that crosses the street you want to turn into.
The difference is that here in Austria walking is much more common and you usually get fined quickly if you take the right of way from a pedestrian
But Dutch traffic lights for cars also make clear whether or not this is an issue you need to watch out for; if the traffic light has an arrow pointing right, you're guaranteed to not be crossing pedestrians on green. If it's a solid circle, you need to watch out. My driving instructor paid a lot of attention to that.
And of course being South Africa you also have to watch out for the “stopped” cars, which are never quite stopped and actually edge forward while the driver is checking their phone and not watching if they’ll bump into a pedestrian crossing. When I used to run there I had to tap the bonnet/hood of cars multiple times to catch the attention of the driver because they were edging forward over the crossing while checking their phone.
That's not true - in Poland you get a green right turn arrow even on red, and you can legally drive over a crossing even when the pedestrians have a green light to cross. It is absolutely your responsibility to make sure that it is safe to do so.
https://www.gazelka.pl/blog/zielona-strzalka-warunkowego-skr...
I agree that the pedestrians should double-check in these sorts of situations, because the cemetery is full with people who have had the law on their side, but, nevertheless, it's primarily the drivers' responsibility to respect the law.
In aviation safety, it has long been established that, regardless of how clearly you establish who is responsible for what, if reality is such that people frequently can't actually carry out their responsibilities effectively, then you'll end up with disasters; disasters where you'll have someone to officially blame, but disasters nonetheless.
This is quite relevant to many pedestrian-car interactions. The problem with right turns over crossings where pedestrians have priority, is that in many situations, even if the driver is responsible for ensuring the turn is safe, it isn't possible for them to do so effectively. In many California right-on-red situations, for example, the driver is responsible both for ensuring that the road to their left is clear, and that the crossing to their right (and in front of them) is clear. Traffic, visibility, and speeds often mean that ensuring the road to the left is clear requires the driver to be looking far to their left until almost immediately before turning, and then accelerate quickly. At the same time, ensuring crossings are clear requires them to look both ahead and to their right, and similarly, visibility and layout often mean that the relevant portion of the crossing can go from being clear to blocked almost instantly, so the driver must be looking to their right immediately before turning. The two responsibilities conflict, and in order to turn, the driver must choose which risk to prioritize: if they prioritize checking for pedestrians, they'll increase the risk of a two-vehicle collision, and if they prioritize checking for vehicles, they'll increase the risk of hitting a pedestrian. Not turning is an option, but at least in California there would be considerable pressure culturally and from other drivers to do so, potentially to the level of threats and violence. It is not a good situation to put someone in.
The only time I have ever been hit by a car as a pedestrian was when I was very mildly hit by a driver turning right immediately after I stepped into a crossing. Legally, she was entirely at fault, but as I already felt the crossing was problematic, she was very apologetic, and I was entirely uninjured, we just didn't report it. And in hindsight, the intersection was just horrible. She couldn't see me because I was to her right and would have been obscured by trees and parked cars until immediately before entering the crossing; in order to avoid being hit by traffic, she needed to look to the left. While not legally my responsibility, in order to see her, I would have needed to look behind me before entering the intersection, but I also needed to watch carefully for cross traffic. In utterly bad design, despite heavy traffic and a 35mph speed limit, pedestrians always had legal right of way at the crossing, so she couldn't even have waited to have right of way.
No, it varies. Turning cars in Britain never go over 'walk' crossings, but they do in Denmark. It's something I check whenever I drive to a new country.
I think "right turn on red" should be banned first, as this leads to a car drive looking left to see if the road is clear, rather than looking right where pedestrians might be crossing.
I'm convinced that North America will only get its act together when gasoline reaches $9.00/gal. Only then will middle class folks start looking toward city living and only then will we get any appreciable progress in city life. I only hope that we reach that point BEFORE the climate catastrophe worsens beyond repair. The fracking boom doesn't have me very confident of this.
What if North America successfully moves from petrol-powered cars to electric ones, and autonomous vehicles get rolled out, and in the end the sprawling development and the reliance on vehicles remains just as entrenched?
I would actually defend right-on-red. Indeed, when I do drive, I get annoyed by all the "no turn on red" signs which slow things down.
In my estimation, the problem (locally, anyway) is cultural: drivers don't think to look, or else they feel entitled to turn first even if I'm crossing already and they think they can squeeze by faster. Convince these drivers to care about pedestrians, and to yield when legally required to, and you've solved the problem.
Can the car drive in these situations?
1. Right turn, red for car, green for pedestrian.
2. Right turn, green for car, green for pedestrian.
3. Right turn, green for car, red for pedestrian.
In USA, in some states the car driving in situation 1 is allowed (and naturally 2). I assume in most states 1 is not allowed and 2 is allowed.
In Europe, I assume driving the car in situation 1 is not allowed anywhere. 2 is mixed, some places have traffic lights that create this green for both, some don't.
3 is of course allowed everywhere in the world.
Funny thing is that situation 1 is now allowed for bicycle with the new M12 sign
Typically, at least here in Germany, a crossing cycles between two states:
The key thing here is that pedestrians don't cross the "active" direction, i.e. when cars are going in a straight line from south to north, they will never run into a pedestrian crossing the road in front of them. This is ideal, because cars going in a straight direction tend to go quickly, so we want to alternate fast cars and pedestrians.However, obviously cars don't just go north and south, sometimes they turn. To turn, the car naturally needs to slow down, and also typically be more aware of their surroundings. Theoretically, this means that they are a lot more likely to see, and be able to stop for, a pedestrian crossing the road as they turn.
The argument then goes that this group of cars is slow and aware enough that they can share a stretch of road with pedestrians (unlike fast cars traveling in a straight line, which must not share a stretch of road with pedestrians). Which means that you could allow pedestrians to cross if (and only if) the cars that they would intersect with are slow, turning cars. The advantage is that you go from three states in the cycle (cars N/S, cars E/W, all pedestrians) to two (cars N/S + pedestrians E/W, cars E/W + pedestrians N/S), which improves throughput because fewer people need to wait.
In practice, this works for relatively small junctions with one or possibly two lanes, but three+ lanes become more complicated and need more states to handle the cars going left and right from different directions. But there is a thought process here about trying to find the right balance between safety and efficiency. As someone from the UK, I'm not sure I'm a fan, but some of that might just be not being used to it.
But I may be wrong - statistics seem to agree with you.
If it's an arrow, cars have priority and don't have to worry about other traffic getting in their way. It's mostly for left turns (a green left arrow indicates that traffic coming in front has a red light) but it also works for pedestrians, a right arrow means that pedestrians and bicycles have red lights.
If it's a disc, then cars should pay attention to other traffic and observe regular priority rules, so stop for pedestrians and bicycles that likely have a green light at the same time as the cars do.
For pedestrians and bicycles, a green light basically means they always have priority and cars must stop for them wherever they come from.
I thought this was a weird statement for him to be allowed to make because a) he was a fact witness and that ain’t a fact and b) he was the officer who responded to the scene where he encountered a bicyclist trapped under a hummer… which was turning into a one way street as the bicyclist approached from the right.
(The cyclist won a shit-ton of money, of course).
"Turns on red are extremely dangerous to vulnerable road users: a 1980 Insurance Institute of Highway Safety study found that they increase pedestrian crashes by 60 percent, and bicycle crashes by 100 percent." [2]
[1] https://www.boston.com/news/crime/2021/11/04/lawsuit-flawed-...
[2] https://mass.streetsblog.org/2023/06/15/guest-column-why-bos...
If the light is directional left/right, it means everyone else has a red light.
Technically, in most of the US, if a pedestrian looks like they're wanting to cross the street at a corner, that legally makes it a crosswalk whether it's marked as such or not (excepting for ones that have a sign indicating that there is no pedestrian crossing allowed). Failing to stop to allow the pedestrian to cross is an infraction and you can be ticketed for it.
Practically speaking, though, you're correct.
> that's in one of the more pedestrian friendly cities in the country, San Francisco.
Wait, what? San Francisco is considered a pedestrian-friendly city? That seriously boggles my mind. I mean, there are certainly cities that are worse, but there are also plenty of cities that are better.
I saw an accident in front of my eyes where this played out - a turning car mowed an elderly couple crossing slowly with the help of walking sticks. It was not pretty.
Perpetrators tend to be let off easily for cultural reasons. That's the real problem that needs to be addressed.
Drivers will respect pedestrians when the law is evenly enforced
They are. When you turn right on your green, the pedestrians have a green light. They have priority of course but then you are free to cross the crossing on their green.
I second this.
As a pedestrian it's pointless to have to wait when there were no other pedestrians crossing shortly before me and there won't be any shortly after me.
As a driver it's infuriating to have to stop at an empty crossing because the pedestrians eventually crossed during a short gap between the cars when they got tired waiting.
The advantage of this is that it's pretty easy to detect cars by detection loops in the road, and if you detect them in time, the car doesn't even have to slow down. Unless there are too many of them; then they will sometimes have to wait for pedestrians to cross.
I don't quite understand what the flags in Bellevue are for. Are there no traffic lights? But then what are the crosswalk buttons for?
It is a cheap non solution that allows leaders to say they did something without actually doing something that would require a sacrifice, such as money, or in the case, sacrificing the convenience of drivers who are presumably more politically powerfully than pedestrians.
The crosswalk buttons work, the traffic lights turn red, but that does not mean a driver will pay attention and check for pedestrians.
Right turns on red lights are allowed. As are left turns on greens, while the walk signal will simultaneously tell a person they can walk across the road. In both cases, the traffic light does not stop the driver, the driver has to be actively checking for a pedestrian.
All of this absurdity could be solved with a simple stop sign, but that would be a minor inconvenience to motorists.
Its a road after all
I hate it as much as you but thats the reality.
Also, unprotected left turns are just crazy dangerous.
(They do in the UK, and often (I think not always) a little spinning knob underneath for the blind.)
It rudely makes cars stop and wait while also giving drivers nothing to do other than stare at me.
It’s much easier and less aita (reddit reference) to just cross against traffic when light to nil. And I’d rather live dangerously.
However, not recommended if you are prone to tripping or fainting, or at night, or if there is a certain level of traffic. ymmv depending on locale.
Why don't you consider it rude to make the people walking stop?
Waiting a couple of seconds is the exception and you would have to wait that long for the light to change.
So it is not making the people walking stop, if you think about it.
The world will be fair when drivers have to get out of their cars and push a button to get a green light, while pedestrians automatically get a walk signal every cycle.
After 50 years of that it'll be even, and we can go to a system where everyone gets their turn automatically.
The only unambiguous win (I think) would be for the light to change immediately when you press the button, with the throttling delay afterwards, as a few others have said in this thread.
I wish I knew whether traffic signal designers intentionally don't use that design, or whether it simply doesn't occur to them. (Or is there some downside to that design?)
If a driver sees me walking in the crosswalk and notices that our paths will intersect, he speeds up.
Everyone does it and everyone accepts the behavior —- it has become so ingrained within driving culture that no one questions how insane it is to try to speed past a guy pushing a stroller to shave six seconds off of a trip.
Of course, people respond to incentives, so we shouldn’t blame individuals for operating within the constraints they inherited. Traffic calming is the way to fix this problem but as long as we as a culture never ask drivers to make trade offs for pedestrians, we will always be stuck driving everywhere and forcing people to ask permission to cross the road.
The problem with the button is this - too many intersections are built for cars and not people. The car is there “by default” and the pedestrian must ask permission to enter their realm. If there is a place which requires pedestrians to ask permission to enter a road which is dominated by fast moving cars…something has gone very wrong.
It's a weird experience reading this about something I've never done nor really observed very often. People speed up when they see a pedestrian in a crosswalk? I see people stopping for pedestrians all the time. Sometimes cars will stop for me when I wish they wouldn't: just keep going, you were fine, I'm still like 5 seconds away from your path.
> The car is there “by default” and the pedestrian must ask permission to enter their realm
That's such a weirdly negative way of looking at the world. Dozens to hundreds of cars pass per minute and fewer than one pedestrian does (on average), so the pedestrian notifies the intersection that they're there. You'd rather every single light cycle assume pedestrians are crossing, even when 95% of the time they're not? You'd like to waste every driver's time to make some point about society?
There are plenty of intersections where a very minor road crosses a main road. When cars come to the intersection on the minor road, they "hit the button" by driving over the sensor, and the intersection knows they're there. Are they the poor pathetic outsiders "asking for permission" to "enter the realm" of the major street? I guess you could look at it that way if you wanted to be angry all the time. It's just simple optimization to make as many people as happy as possible. Just hit the damn walk button; it's fine.
Yes, many drivers try to be courteous.
But many others are drag racing at 75 mph on a 35 mph road while I try to walk across with my child in the middle of the afternoon - an anecdote which is not exaggerated at all.
(That said, I’m certainly not angry at you…just the system.)
But I don’t want to waste all of societies time waiting at pointless walk stoppages…that would be absurd and it wasn’t my point.
I believe that walk buttons are a symptom of a problem - specifically that there are lots of places which try to mix pedestrians and cars and end up being worse for both.
In my mind, we need more roads specifically dedicated to _only_ cars which offer no possibility of encountering a pedestrian at all. Interstates have no crossing buttons.
And at the same time, we need more spaces which are designed to let cars pass slowly through them, where people tend to walk, bike, scooter, and crawl. These spaces need no crossing buttons either.
We can do so much better as a culture.
These people drive with speed right up the stop sign, don't turn their blinkers on, and then with 40% probability, turn anyway. So whenever I get to that intersection, if I see a car approaching there, even if they don't have their blinker on to indicate they might want to turn where I want to walk, I wait to make sure they come to a complete stop before I enter the intersection. Sometimes the buggers will just start turning slowly into the intersection as I'm still walking. It's extra great when they start blocking cars going the other way.
Shortly after moving to Mountain View I was walking home from work and distracted thinking about a technical problem, I managed to walk right in front of a car that had the green. They stopped and apologized to me! (I assume they were also somewhat distracted and thought they were at fault...) Very different experience from the east coast.
I don't recall anyone in norcal speeding up towards pedestrians. And on bikes at unprotected crossings and in merging cars I've experienced the opposite problem where everyone slows down, spacing out traffic to optimally make it so you don't get a break long enough to allow crossing.
I think that has contributed to an especially bad micro-culture around a few blocks where people just get used to weaving their car in between rather annoying pedestrians.
I’ll never forget one day when I was in Sweden trying to cross a road. A driver stopped for me to cross and I was so surprised it actually changed what I expect of myself when near pedestrians.
I've lived in the US all my life and I don't recall seeing this even once.
On the other hand, the thing I experience that infuriates me is when the walk sign comes on so I start to step off the curb to cross and a car making a right turn at my corner of the intersection doesn't even pretend to check for pedestrians and comes barreling through the corner because they were trying to beat the red light.
Most of the time they see me at the last second and stop before running me over. I make a point of quickly stepping back on to curb and giving them a death stare before I continue.
Sometimes they don't see me and barrel through the corner. If I don't step back, I would get run over. Infuriating.
In some places the pedestrians ALWAYS have the right of way (cars going 40-50 mph will stop for pedestrian crossing). In other places, cars slowly force their way into a full crosswalk.
Yes, it's cultural. But it's different everywhere in the US.