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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>>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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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)
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
> 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".
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. :)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> ... 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.
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.
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.
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.
> When a stranger murdered Kitty Genovese outside of her Brooklyn apartment while thirty seven bystanders watched without so much as calling the police,
This is a popular myth spread by the media because it fitted the Lord Of The Flies-type view of humanity that was popular at the time. It's completely false, however. Most of those 37 bystanders weren't watching at all and had no idea what was going on. The few that did notice what was going on tried to chase away the attacker, call the police, or help Kitty.
That doesn't necessarily mean the bystander effect itself is incorrect; I remember a much more recent event where dozens of people watched while someone drowned. But the murder of Kitty Genovese is not a good example of it, and the effect is clearly a lot more complicated than it's often presented, because there are also many examples where a large crowd does help, sometimes at significant risk to themselves.
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...
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!
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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
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!
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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).
Readit News
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.
Keep the button, but for goodness sake stop letting cars drive through crosswalks in the "walk" phase.
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-...
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.
"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...
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 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.
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.
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?
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...
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.
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.
Sounds like Naples
If the light is directional left/right, it means everyone else has a red light.
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.
Sarcasm?
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.
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.
Also, unprotected left turns are just crazy dangerous.
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.
Dead Comment
Its a road after all
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?
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.
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
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.
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".
Dead Comment
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. :)
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.
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 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 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.
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
Deleted Comment
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.
This is a popular myth spread by the media because it fitted the Lord Of The Flies-type view of humanity that was popular at the time. It's completely false, however. Most of those 37 bystanders weren't watching at all and had no idea what was going on. The few that did notice what was going on tried to chase away the attacker, call the police, or help Kitty.
That doesn't necessarily mean the bystander effect itself is incorrect; I remember a much more recent event where dozens of people watched while someone drowned. But the murder of Kitty Genovese is not a good example of it, and the effect is clearly a lot more complicated than it's often presented, because there are also many examples where a large crowd does help, sometimes at significant risk to themselves.
It's a well documented thing that people are unable to recognize drowning.
Notice all the people in these videos oblivious to the drowning people nearby.
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!
- Please press
- Wait for green
Also, my wife is the same.
https://youtu.be/QUg1t-JfAyY?si=pIiq2--f7WfkKYMG
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)
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.
Sincerely, you might be on to something here.
Are your fingers OK?
:)
Deleted Comment
Yeah, it's not much. In any other circumstance I press the dang button.
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).
[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.
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!
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.
WAIT…WAIT… WAI-WA-WAITWAITWAIT…
…CROSS SIGNAL IS ON…
BEEP… BEEP… BEEP… BEEP
In other countries I find the lack of feedback quite frustrating.
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.
Only thanks to Covid and not wanting to touch things did I find out it did nothing
In the end, it is a like a secret button only the locals know about :)
(took me a long time to figure that out)
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.
(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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.