[Nfbf-l] Today I found out many crosswalk signal buttons don't do anything when you press them

[Alan Dicey]

Dear Friends,
I Thought some would be interested in this article.
Which also makes me think and ask about what happened to those "Audio 
Pedestrian Crossing Signals" they were talking about installing  for we the 
Blind decades ago.
Myself, and about 30 other Blind People, participated in a 4 hour seminar 
and demonstration way back in 1995 at the Miami Lighthouse for The Blind 
where producers of such "audio Crossing Equipment" and Miami-Dade County 
authorities, were trying to determine which model was most  acceptable to us 
as Blind users.
As far as I know, after all these years only one has been installed in 
Miami-Dade County, and that was directly across the Miami Lighthouse for the 
Blind on S W 6 street  and 8th Avenue.
Correction: Oh yes, one also across from the Miami-Dade County Government 
Building.
With Best Regards,
God Bless,
Alan
Plantation, Florida

Today I found out many crosswalk signal buttons don't do anything when you 
press them.  They are only there to give you something to press, called 
"placebo buttons", not unlike how most thermostat controls in large office 
buildings don't do anything, but are just there to give you a way to think 
you are changing the temperature of your office space. (Some of these also 
include white noise generators to make you think the temperature control box
is working, when in fact, it's just turning on the white noise generator.)

In any event, in New York City, an estimated 90% of the pedestrian crossing
buttons do nothing.  You'll find the same trend in most major cities
throughout most regions of the world.  The reason why is that allowing
people to manually override set traffic timers can severely disrupt traffic.
Instead, modern computerized systems are used to help maximize throughput in
intersections, including factoring in pedestrian crossings automatically.
As the director of engineering at the Boston Transportation Department, John
DeBenedictis states, "It's a numbers game. We know that there are going to
be pedestrians at virtually every single cycle during the day (at certain
intersections)." So the buttons are disabled to let the system dictate the
most efficient way to time things in the intersection.
In some cases, certain buttons actually do something specific times of the
day, while other times they are ignored by the traffic system- generally
during peak traffic times.
Some cities also program it so that the buttons won't actually affect the
timing of things, but only whether the "Walk" signal will display. "If you
stand here and wait and don't push it, you'll never get that walk signal and
legally, you're not supposed to walk into the intersection without that walk
signal. It's a ticket-able offense," states signal operations engineer Val
Melvin from Spokane, Washington.
Canada seems to be one of the few holdouts for keeping the crosswalk buttons
working. In fact, as recently as 2008 in Victoria, British Columbia
(population 80,000 city and 350,000 metro), it was found there weren't any
crosswalk buttons that didn't do something when you pressed them.
There is almost never any direct indication given as to which buttons do
something and which don't.  As a general rule, though, the larger the city
and the heavier the traffic in a particular intersection at a certain time
of day, the less likely it is that the crosswalk buttons at that
intersection actually do anything.
It should also be noted that even when the buttons are enabled and set to
affect the timing of a light change, pressing them multiple times isn't
going to make the light change faster, nor will pressing an elevator button
multiple times.  Of course, people seem to like to do it anyways, which is
part of why placebo crosswalk buttons are there.  People like something to
do while they stand and wait and there's something inherently satisfying
about pressing buttons.

According to research done on the roads of New Zealand, the common zebra
striped crosswalk, without any additional signaling, actually increases the
chances of pedestrians getting hit by a car by 28% over if the person had
just Jaywalked.  It is thought this is the case because pedestrians crossing
in crosswalks are much less careful than those crossing the road elsewhere,
even to the point that many people observed in studies don't even bother to
look if anyone is coming before entering a crosswalk.  A similar study done
in the United States on 1000 marked and unmarked popular crossing areas
showed that marked locations had a much higher rate of pedestrian accidents
than unmarked so long as there weren't any other signals included with the
crosswalk, such as a stop sign/light or flashing lights.  They also found
that including a raised "safety" median for pedestrians to stand in the
middle of roads made no difference to the safety of the pedestrians
regardless of the number of lanes on the road, so is essentially a waste of
money to include in crosswalks.
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