[il-talk] Push button, wait forever. Crosswalk buttons may be fake.

[Bill Reif]

Hello,

I have always suspected the below to be true. This is no small matter 
for the blind, who may rely on having given themselves a walk signal we 
have no way of knowing we haven't. Makes us wonder why we took ourselves 
off course to look for the stupid things. In Springfield, some of them 
have had the buttons dug out of the centers. I have pasted the text of 
an article on gajitz.com below. The article is at 
http://gajitz.com/push-button-wait-forever-crosswalk-buttons-are-fake/

Cordially,
Bill

If you’ve ever wondered with suspicious irritation whether the crosswalk 
button you’ve
just pressed will ever make the light change, you might have been 
justified. Some
of those buttons, depending on where you live, don’t really do anything. 
They’re
called placebo buttons, and they’re there to make you think that you 
have some small amount of control
over your world. To be fair, most of those crosswalk buttons were 
functional at one
point but were made obsolete by computerized traffic light timing.
push button for luck crosswalk buttons
Officials from the NYC Transportation Department
have admitted
that, while the pedestrian walk signal buttons were once functional, the 
majority
of them have been disabled since traffic lights were automated; they’ve 
been decommissioned
since the 1980s but continue to display the official-looking signs 
instructing pedestrians
to push the button to cross. Officials in Honolulu and
Victoria, B.C.
have also acknowledged that some of the buttons in those cities are, 
shall we say,
more useful than others. But whether the button you’re about to press 
will have an
effect on the light or not depends on the area you happen to be in at 
the time, and
there are no signs to indicate which are which.

There may be an overall advantage to placebo buttons, though: they help 
us to get
through mundane activities like waiting for a green light or an elevator 
without
breaking the commuter fog. The auto-pilot state that many of us go into 
when in the
midst of boring everyday routines is preserved by pushing the “walk” 
button even
when you know it won’t help, or pushing the elevator button when it’s 
already illuminated.
It’s a ritual, and preserving that ritual gives our brains a break from 
having to
think about these routines.