There are some places in the Netherlands that have great pedestrian/bike traffic buttons.
- They have distinct ticking sounds for: locating them (slow tick), when the button has been succesfully pressed (slightly faster tick), when you can walk (very fast tick) , when the traffic light will turn red soon (intermittent fast tick) so you know to hurry up and then back to the normal slow tick.
- They have a ring of leds around the button that lights up when you've pressed it and then counts down by turning of the leds one by one to when the light is gonna turn green.
- The ticking can be felt through the entire pole
- Often there are two traffic lights on it. One big one above and a smaller one at eye-level.
Here's a button that shows the wait-indicator ring:
When we were in Sweden, they had similar ticking buttons that had temporarily been reprogrammed for Eurovision. So the ticking was now the metronome for a gentle monophonic synth version of either "Euphoria" or "Heroes" (Swedish Eurovision entries)
> Cars can spot them as they drive and try to run yellows more often
They can also be used to avoid panic stops. I watch them and begin braking if the light will turn yellow before I enter the intersection. Safer an less stressful.
Nice, but imho that indicator ring could have been a little bigger. I can imagine that if there are a handful of bicyclists waiting, they all can't see the button, especially if one of them is leaning on the pole.
When I see one of these I reminded of Jan Gehl saying they are for reminding people who walk that they must keep asking permission to cross the road (cartoons at http://reviewanew.com/2014/11/17/the-cartoon-case-for-walkab... ). They might be attractive to some, but you soon tire of them. In the last five years the design has changed to remove the red light just above the button to acknowledge your request has been received, so now if it isn't working you'll never know. As Jan Gehl keeps saying to governments who invite him over here, you need to remove the buttons but that seems to fall on deaf ears. However we've been able to detect people who drive and even those on bicycles now with ease. Sigh.
people who walk that they must keep asking permission to cross the road
Driving and walking are wildly disparate modes of transportation, and having them coexist in adjacent physical space and intersect each other inevitably requires some set of rules describing who will have priority and when.
Many intersections in cities simply have a fixed repetitive cycle of granting priority to different modes in different directions each in turn automatically. Those which require explicit "requesting" of priority typically occur when traffic of a given mode or in a given direction is light enough, compared to other modes/directions, that the overall highest throughput occurs from explicit request. It's also not incredibly burdensome to use a button for this in the case of the pedestrian; detection mechanisms for motorized vehicles/bicycles on the road are there because a button would be unwieldy for those vehicles, not because designers of intersections want to force pedestrians into some type of ultra-lowest-class group. Indeed, the "high class" (in your view) automatic detection is often unreliable and leads to a far more conscious feeling of having to work to obtain priority, as vehicles shift forward and back hunting for the magic spot that will trigger the detector.
And honestly, the number of buttons which are non-functional but simply exist to provide a placebo feeling of speeding up an otherwise fixed pattern in which everyone gets priority in turn makes it kind of a silly argument anyway.
It makes sense to control pedestrian traffic in some intersections, but it just seems like they're not even trying to optimize pedestrian throughput. What makes the lack of feedback for crossing buttons worse is the fact that many of them are so conservative about letting you cross that you question if they are working. I encounter a lot that will refuse to let you cross if the light is already green, even if there is still plenty of time left. Unfortunately, lowering pedestrian accidents looks great, while saving pedestrian time is hard to measure.
In certain especially pedestrian unfriendly places I've lived (orange county area), the buttons really do give pedestrians a lower status. First, you don't get the walk sign if the button wasn't pressed before the light changed, even when the light is long enough for the pedestrian cycle. Second, you must press the button before the light changes, or you don't get the light. Third, the pedestrian light turns red far, far earlier than necessary (like, the light will stay green for 90 seconds after the pedestrian signal turns red).
> and having them coexist in adjacent physical space and intersect each other inevitably requires some set of rules describing who will have priority and when.
Zebra crossings (where pedestrians get right of way unless it's dangerous for vehicles to stop) seem to work pretty well.
Right of way is a deadly concept unless the driver knows of the concept, enforcement is actually done, and breaking this rule, at the very least, results in the driver losing their right to drive.
In many places (in Europe at least, I don't know much about the rest of the world), cars are prioritised on roads with larger amounts of traffic (pedestrians have to "ask premission to cross" or wait) and pedestrians are prioritised on roads with less traffic (they can just cross, and the cars have to stop). This is a reasonable compromise in my opinion.
There are some places where you as a pedestrian feel like a second-class citizen though. Lack of pedestrian crossings, heavy traffic in city centers, police who think jaywalking when there is no traffic is a problem etc.
Seems about the same in South Korea and Taiwan, where on narrow alleys in residential areas cars are expected to move really slowly and peacefully co-exist with pedestrian traffic. What European countries do you have in mind?
It's likely a usage-related calculation. If an intersection is known to nearly always have cars but rarely pedestrians, a walk signal makes sense.
In Washington, DC, most intersections do not have a traffic button, so pedestrians and cars are equally accounted for in the signaling. Only a handful of intersections, where pedestrians are less likely, have traffic buttons.
In the Netherlands quite a few intersections have motion detectors for pedestrians just like there are induction loops to detect cars. The buttons are sometimes added because they seem to reduce the amount of accidents on that intersection.
I don't like the doubled arrow and the separate button.
In germany things are worse though: sometimes no feedback at all, feels like a hard cover plastic without any feedback at all. It seems to register touch (some do have a "please wait" lighting up when you touch it).
For the blind there is a nub hidden underneath. It has an embossed arrow on it and because of its horizontal orientation it can point precisely to the right direction. It vibrates when it's safe to cross. However this is the place that stays wet the longest after rain and where people smear their chewing gum and the cleaning personal doesn't even see it. I still enjoy the buttons, so I don'- have to focus on the lights all the time.
edit: when you don't know about the nub for the blind, there is no arrow indication at all. When standing on an isle in the middle of a street and there are two buttons on one pole opposed to each other, I never knew which to press: the one facing where I want to go, or the one facing me while I face where I want to go (I think it's the latter)
And then there are is a new version of the "bad feedback" button in Germany.
It has a "please wait" light but it will only activate a few seconds after touching the button. So anyone touching the button softly thinks it didn't work and touches harder (some hit it with huge force). Unfortunately the first touch would be enough, but who would expect that a touch takes a few seconds until it's converted into a visible feedback for the user...
I don't get it how something like this can get through an user acceptance test.
Yea the German ones were weird. My ex (who is legally blind) would use the blind button, but wasn't sure if it actually did anything. They have no feed back of visual indicators otherwise.
I really like the New Zealand ones. They're like the Australian ones, but the red guy on the other side only lights up after it's been pressed (instead of the little red dot that's on the button for the Australian ones).
Also there were a few Australian ones that switched to the non-button feed back. OMG they sounded awful. There were like two where I lived. I think they were an experiment that failed and were forgotten about.
These things are so much more satisfying to mash than their American counterparts -- often, a tiny little nubbin that's very hard to push (and may become completely frozen in winter, meaning you are thoroughly hosed).
Deployment of alternative switches (a convex masher, a touch-sensitive dingus which vibrates slightly when it detects your press) has been uneven at best here.
To be fair, not _all_ American models are like that. In fact, a decent portion of the buttons in my town are very similar to the one described in the article.
But, then again, I live on a college campus which has higher standards for accessibility than most areas in the US.
I love the big chunky button on these things, but I have a few implementation niggles that someone might be able to shed light on.
My main gripe is that the buttons aren't symmetrical with their partner button pairs on the other side of the traffic flow. If I'm approaching the junction and there's someone on the other side of the traffic waiting to cross already, the green man on my side should also activate when the lights change. Means I end up having to do this jaunty quick-step fencing lunge to stab at the button if I see the lights changing, which I usually just miss out on then have to wait to cross.
Or the annoying behaviour that there's no 'automatic mode' in peak hour, where there's a whole bunch of pedestrians waiting to cross on both sides every phase and everyone else assumes someone else has pushed the button, then the lights change and there's no green man...
Different places have different practices and different legislation. In some places, walking at a red light is forbidden and there could even be a fine. In some others, your red man indicates that even if there is a green light for some vehicles (going straight ahead), there might also be a green arrow light that tells turning vehicles have right of way. The green man tells you that you can go.
It's easy enough to see if there's a green arrow. Is that the actual problem? Or is every other signal identical to the situation where you're supposed to cross, except for the one on the crosswalk itself?
The lights are turned towards the cars. Sometimes it's physically impossible for you to see them, because they are on the other sides of roads, not visible from the side where you are. Also, even if you see the light, it might change rapidly and then you don't have enough time to make it across.
In Hungary it's pretty simple: you're allowed to cross when the green man is visible. That's what that green man is supposed to signalize. That's its purpose. If it's red, you are not allowed to cross, because some other car traffic direction has priority.
Now of course you can cross in practice even if it's red for you, but it's illegal (rarely enforced).
Because of shades surrounding the traffic lights (to prevent glare from the sun) it is often impossible for pedestrians to see if a turn signal is lit from their perpendicular position.
So in the event of a red light for through traffic but a green light for turning traffic you don't want pedestrians crossing the road. That's why it is important to have separate lights indicating when a pedestrian may cross.
there is no way for me to know when there is a green arrow light for vehicles that come from opposite direction and turn left (and therefore come my way).
The buttons requesting green man for pedestrians and cyclists is, btw, known here as "humiliation button" (because it forces cyclists to stop; there is automatic detection for motor vehicles on the driveway, but for pedestrians and cyclists they haven't found a reliable way to do it).
When there's no junction, you don't, and in all cases green for traffic implies green for people - but not vice versa. At a crossroads traffic must be blocked in both directions for it to be safe to cross. A red light for traffic in one direction means vehicles travelling in the other direction could still turn left or right through it.
As the are in affect two different crossing, with a stagger between them. The guidance is to avoid a pedestrian having to wait a whole cycle in the middle or tempted to rush both parts. One cycle wait, breaks down a bit for heavy used crossing. But the cycle time should be lower, if ped flow are up.
In an ideal situation, you could set the order of each part to be tidal - if near for example a station exit.
The whole front is push sensitive, the lights are circular so they can be seen from the sides as well, and the side has a relief map of the crosswalk for the blind.
I didn't realize even these things have NFC in them these days
We have those in Finland as well, and I hate the lack of feedback when touching it. The sound seems to be faulty or disabled in many of them. If the light happens to be broken, there is no telling whether it registers anything. I end up banging it and then kicking it just in case a harder push is needed.
After a year living in Sweden I still find myself pushing the raised LED light, which isn't pushable. Instead you have to push the manufacturer's logo painted flush on the front face. The crosswalk maps are neat though.
So many complaints about placebo-or-not buttons in comments. Feels like from countries that have no such dead simple thing as digital countdowns on traffic lights. You see infinity or --, you push the button.
These buttons are horrible from a UX perspective. The old design had a light that would activate after you pressed to acknowledge your request. Many of these new ones don't, so pedestrians will stand there mashing over and over as there's no feedback.
Not to mention the smaller metal lozenge at the top which looks like a button but does nothing, so people press both surfaces in confusion.
Oh and people are so Pavlovian trained to start walking at the "cross" sound that when you have these buttons side by side at an intersection people will literally start walking into traffic when the adjacent button triggers.
>Not to mention the smaller metal lozenge at the top which looks like a button but does nothing, so people press both surfaces in confusion.
If you'd ever touched one of these (or read the article properly), you'd know it provides a tactile mirror to the sound the button is playing, telling deaf people when to cross.
If I'm listening to music I often stick my thumb over it even though I'm not deaf, so I don't have to keep looking at the light to see when I can cross. The top of the button case is just the right size to rest your palm on it and allow your thumb to drop down and rest on the popper plate.
If it's designed for blind people, I don't think visually signaling its function is necessarily a great option (though to be fair, it would at least allow sighted people to point out the device to their blind friends).
Over 90% of people are not blind. Why deprive them of extra information they are able to use? And even if we wanted, reducing everyone to blind person's abilities won't work: If there are 5 people waiting for the same traffic light they can't all hold their finger on the button at the same time.
Sighted people can see the (much more convenient) lighted sign that says "cross/don't cross". A tactile device is unnecessary for those people, and it doesn't really matter if they know that it exists or what it is for. As such, I would say the biggest design priority with respect to the sighted majority would be to make sure it's not actively confusing (i.e. it won't be mistaken for the cross button), and visual cues as to its purpose would be above and beyond.
I know I'm only one (Australian) person, but I've known this for as long as I can remember and have interacted with them. I've never noticed people pressing it in confusion, but I do the same thing where I touch it if I've got headphones in so I know when it turns green.
Not blind people? In the UK the boxes have a spinner underneath. (So please never stick your gum under the box) and the spinner is for blind people who can't see the lights. Not all lights have sounders on.
They don't all (in the UK) make a sound. In particular, crossings where there are multiple light controlled traffic streams near to each other will have no audible signal to prevent the problem - mentioned up thread - of zombie pedestrians (like me) walking into moving traffic at the prompting of an adjacent crossing signal. Crossings in residential areas will either not have an audible signal or will have an audible signal only between certain hours. The one outside my flat for example stops bleeping at 8PM and doesn't resume until 6AM.
Source : when you are initially registered blind in the UK a rehab officer comes round and explains all the workings, including the largely unknown spinner on the underside of the switch box. And yes, please don't stick gum there.
I said the lozenge was to assist deaf people.
DanBC asked for a clarification that I meant deaf people rather than not blind people, and cross-compared to a UK pedestrian button.
I clarified that blind people can hear the sound that Australian buttons make.
You missed the point entirely, downvoted my post and started talking about how not all UK buttons make sound.
That's nice, but not what everyone else was talking about. (twit)
Actually I find it profoundly challenging but usually rewarding enough to justify the effort. Usually.
One day I shall write a short guide titled 'Rhetorical Questions : how might we answer them?'. 'Can you [not] X' will be chapter 2. Prize of one splendid upvote for anyone who can guess the title of chapter 1.
The metal lozenge does multiple things. It gives you a tactile sense of when its safe to cross. More importantly -- it gives a direction to a blind person. The sound can tell you it's safe to cross - but not which way. That license is aligned with the direction to walk
It's hard to take your criticisms seriously when you are clueless as to what the 'metal lozenge' is for. Have you never even been so curious as to touch it?
Far from 'pants on head idiotic', rather it's 'decent design that could be a bit better'.
> Have you never even been so curious as to touch it?
The correct design is to create it such that it serves the unsighted without enticing the sighted to mistake it for a button and touch it for a function it does not perform.
As another commenter pointed out they could have made that surface not look like a button, then you would not have to discover that UX function, which is superior design. Good design is intuitive.
> The old design had a light that would activate after you pressed to acknowledge your request.
In Victoria the buttons have a light. They also have proximity activation (wave your hand in front of the light) and make a loud noise when you activate it.
> Not to mention the smaller metal lozenge at the top which looks like a button but does nothing, so people press both surfaces in confusion.
It's for people who have issues being able to see the far side of the road (to see if the light is on). They can put their finger on the lozenge to tell if it's safe to cross. It's the same idea as European crossing buttons. IMO the German crossing buttons make the least sense to me -- they have something that looks like a switch but actually just vibrates (for the same reason as the Australian ones vibrate).
I visited Melbourne a few months ago, and there were quite a few of these near the CBD (though not all of them, which might explain why you haven't seen them). They look like a regular crossing button, but the button part is painted black and has a red V made from LEDs (IIRC).
In addition to the lights mentioned in the Wikipedia article above, there is often a sound played when it's safe to cross, and there's a device at the bottom of the traffic light controls that allows you to feel when it's safe to cross.
The British (actually England, Wales and Northern Island) have the design covered by law (TSRGD 2016). Scotland have minor change in the regulations.
The sounder (aka bleeper) and device (aka tactile) are for visually impaired pedestrians. In Scotland, you can also have a voice telling you the vehicles has a red (e.g. Vehicles heading North on Main Street have been given a red signal).
Systems in other counties have advantages and disadvantages (IMHO), lack of a clear standard compared to background noise. Too complex, so problems in maintenance. However some difference in sounds give a better indication to pedestrians on the start/middle/end of crossing time.
The current trend in the UK is towards removing the green/red signal from the opposite pole and sticking them on the switch box. This is supposed to help people like me who have a severe visual impairment. Unfortunately, whoever came up with this idea allowed their good intentions to override a bunch of other design problems, viz:
1) They used a light with basically the same brightness as they were using for the poles on the opposite side of the road and stuck it at head height. Thanks, now that's all I can see at night. Many people with a VI suffer some form of photophobia, so this is not helpful.
2) It completely disregards decades of unconscious habit/muscle memory formation. We are trained pretty much from birth to look across the road for a visual signal while waiting to cross and it's not there anymore because the new signalling method was used as a substitute instead of a complement.
3) The ergonomics of standing looking sideways at a box which blocks your view of the traffic vs standing facing the road being able to scan traffic in both directions and the signal.
4) Since there are no signals on the opposite pole and most complex crossings have no audible signal, there is no longer any way for pedestrians to know that the state of the system has changed or is about to change once they have stepped into the road.
5) With RE to point 3, it is universal that the new boxes are mounted at 90 degrees to the kerb. This means they are facing oncoming traffic (albeit usually on the opposite side of the road). This means they are in driver's eyeline. What happens when a zombie driver sees a light in their eyeline change from red to green? Three times in the last year I have nearly been run down outside my flat due to this particularly stupid human factors error.
6) For extra stupid, newer installs come with a pedestrian detecting PIR sensor mounted on the top of the pole. Not - as one might imagine - to detect a pedestrian and automatically trigger a request but to detect if a pedestrian has pushed the button and then walked away. These are universally either so badly installed or so poorly designed in the first place that the false positive rate is insane. There is no audible or tactile indication that the system has cancelled your request because you're not standing in the particular 30 cm spot its PIR can see.
So the UK gets A for effort but F for implementation.
Not that I'm aware of. RNIB groups have been known to campaign for the addition of pedestrian controlled crossings in specific locations or regions, but part of that is banging on the DfT regs which actually stipulate this design.
I have tried traffic buttons in many different countries (there's a sentence I never thought I'd type) and none have made me as egregiously furious as the Australian ones.
They're an abomination on the level of CSS and the iTunes interface.
These not only give feedback when the button is pressed, but also have a tactile spinner on the bottom for blind people (most, but not all, pedestrian crossings in the UK beep when you can cross however).
There's tactile feedback for the blind on these buttons. I'm not sure I'd class the button you linked as particularly good - most people know what to look for with traffic crossing buttons, and duplicating the lesson on every (quite small) button seems a bit pointless... and useless if you don't read English (eg tourists etc). It's overall too complex for a simple function. Using a white light for 'WAIT' is also a wasted opportunity (should be a regular 'warning' colour instead).
I don't really use either mechanism, but I would guess that the ticker in the linked article (the metal bit in the middle of the arrow gives a strong click) would be preferable to touching something underneath a city-dwelling box, where muck, gunk, and whatever accumulates. That's an edge-case complaint, though.
Another thing to consider with these kinds of things is reliability, maintenance, and cost. May not interest the UX people, but will definitely interest the local councils...
> The same are used in Ireland. Does anyone know why they choose to use these, as opposed to the same as the UK?
Different legislation. Most of UK: tsrgd 2016 legislation, including the North of Ireland. Most UK one with have the tactile on the bottom, especially on the right hand side, as the visually impaired person normally has guide dog on left.
I love the Irish crossings. I'm from the UK and whilst I like our iconic Pelican crossings, the beep-beep-beep is pretty boring. I love the "KAPOWWW!!-tic-tic-tic" you get in Ireland.
As an Australian, whenever I travel overseas I get subtly confused by the lack of audible and touch feedback on pedestrian buttons in many places. I'm not disabled and I still find the aural and tactile elements of an Australian pedestrian button to be a key part of my road crossing experience :)
When I visit Australia I am always charmed by the iconic crosswalk sound. There are a couple of crosswalks in Manhattan that have this sound and PB5. They're around 23rd st & Broadway next to Madison Square Park apparently due to a school for the blind nearby.
Do these buttons really work? Like, all the time?
At some street crossings here in Berlin I get the impression that they're just some placebo to limit your impatience and make you less prone to cross with a red light.
That's probably because the buttons here don't have any tactile feedback. They're touch sensitive and won't make any clic and the light is just a rare occurrence you might find in some of them (and it's completely invisible during the day, if it's there). You really feel like you don't have any way to know if they're even connected to the streetlight system.
Every time I touch them I always try to see whether they're making the light turn green faster and I never ever have that feeling. One should probably approach the thing more scientifically in order to have some sort of closure about them.
"In some Australian cities, in the central business district, the traffic light push buttons don't work at certain times — for example, 7 am to 7 pm, Monday to Wednesday, and 7 am to 9 pm, Thursday to Saturday.
The rationale is that between these busy hours, the road traffic is relatively constant, and also, the pedestrian crossings are in continuous use. So the lights do their own thing.
However, the traffic light push buttons do work outside these hours, including all day Sunday."
... which is kind of annoying if you sleep on top of one. Endless tocking away on a hot summer night where you can't sleep is kind of like water drip torture.
It's worth mentioning that many intersections in Melbourne, Victoria, have pressure sensors embedded in the road and the traffic lights react depending on whether there is traffic on the road.
It can be super frustrating in Berlin to stand at a traffic light with an empty road waiting for the lights to change, especially given the scowling looks of disapproval some older Germans will throw your way if you walk against the lights, despite the street being devoid of traffic!
The Fine Article says that they don't work all the time, and gives the reasoning why: pre-planned patterns in areas of constant traffic use work better. But outside those regular times mentioned in the articles, pressing the button will alter the pattern for you.
> Some rare lights stay red forever if you don't activate the thing.
This is the most annoying thing about pedestrian lights here in Reykjavík. Reykjavík has all kinds of button behavior. Some actually stop traffic almost immediately. Others look identical, and don't actually do anything (except trigger a soft sound and a vibration when the light goes green). Then there are others that are hybrid of the two and let you wait for the surrounding traffic lights before turning green. This wait is seemingly random and can be up to two minutes.
This is a terrible user experience. There is no way of telling how (or whether) a light behaves after you press the button. People are Pavlovian and gradually learn not to press the buttons from the placebo once, and then transfer that behavior to the hybrid ones, and won't cross until someone from the other side finally presses the button.
Around here they look like this[1]. They have about the same sound as the Australian. The entire thing vibrates with the sound.
The blue area on the front is the button (not just the small circle). When pushed the light lights up[2]. On top is a tactile arrow pointing in the direction to walk. On the side is a tactile map showing how the intersection looks (starting from the bottom, at the small arrow): Blocks are lanes/cars, the almost-ellipse is a traffic island and horizontal bars are the sidewalk.
I agree. I thought the yellow light at the bottom is the button, because it's the only button-like object in the picture (and I've plenty of experience with buttons that light up when pushed.) The "blue area" does not look like a button at all, but only a sign to me. If I encountered one of these I'd probably keep trying to press the light...
No one I have mentioned the map to knew about it before. It's kind of like progressive enhancement; if you need it it's there, otherwise it's unobtrusive.
>In some Australian cities, in the central business district, the traffic light push buttons don't work at certain times — for example, 7 am to 7 pm, Monday to Wednesday, and 7 am to 9 pm, Thursday to Saturday.
>The rationale is that between these busy hours, the road traffic is relatively constant, and also, the pedestrian crossings are in continuous use.
That strikes me as a bit stupid. The slight increase in capacity is really only needed at peak times. They could just do away with the buttons entirely.
The traffic lights are optimised for throughput during peak times and optimised for travel time during non-peak times.
Throughput optimisation has the lights cycling at a constant rate, 60 seconds in one direction, 60 seconds in the next direction and so on. It's easy to tack the pedestrian cycle on to that (pedestrians walk in parallel with the traffic, though I've also seen lights which give the pedestrians their own cycle, and pedestrians can also walk diagonally across the intersection). The cycle might also be synchronized with other lights.
The Travel time optimisation for off-peak is completely different. Lights are always stuck onto a single direction (the direction with the most traffic). When a car triggers the sensor in the perpendicular direction, the traffic light quickly cycles and gives them a green light within 10 seconds. The green light only lasts about 5 seconds, barely enough time for a second car to get through the light. It's impossible to get a third though. But in typical night time traffic, this mode makes the traffic light only slightly slower than a stop sign.
Even if a pedestrian did arrive at the traffic light at the same time as a car, there is nowhere near enough time for the pedestrian to get across the road. You can't even run across the road in the allocated time.
The button is needed for two reasons. 1) to signal that a pedestrian is waiting. 2) to request the longer cycle that has enough time for a pedestrian to walk across the road.
Lights are always stuck onto a single direction (the direction with the most traffic). When a car triggers the sensor in the perpendicular direction, the traffic light quickly cycles and gives them a green light within 10 seconds. The green light only lasts about 5 seconds, barely enough time for a second car to get through the light. It's impossible to get a third though.
Wouldn't it be better for the light to stay at the last direction a car traveled through? In my experience, traffic tends to be quite "bursty" (although that could be because of upstream lights causing that) so it seems a slightly different strategy could work better: as long as there are no cars in the other direction, the light stays green. If there are, the light will change immediately if the current direction has no cars; otherwise a timer is started and forces the direction to change when it expires. This seems to incorporate both optimisations you describe.
I live on a residential street with this style of traffic light along it.
I suspect the cycles have been designed this way to also minimise the amount of noise. One or two cars every 30 seconds is less distracting than 5 cars in a row followed by 3min of silence.
Australian traffic signals are also 'smart'. They don't cycle in non-peak hours. They just use sensors to detect oncoming traffic and route appropriately. Main roads default to green, but lights on side roads will switch just before you drive up to them.
This is why the buttons are necessary during non-peak hours... If I press the button, the light will go red as soon as it's safe. Jaywalking isn't a crime here, but this is still very useful in some situations.
Our "Coordinated Adaptive Traffic Control" systems are pretty awesome. Even during peak traffic, all the lights are controlled by a central control room, with a computer that manages all traffic flow as efficiently as possible. It will sometimes shut down a lane or modify a speed limit to allow emergency traffic through or prevent grid-lock further down the freeway, reducing overall travel time. It's able to simulate different traffic flow models and select the best one. The result is that even during peak hours, I can easily travel from the outer suburbs to the CBD (30k/20mi) in approx 40 minutes.
There's a light on a main road near my house that has a one minute cycle. It only changes for cross traffic if someone trips it, but still does a 15 sec countdown on the crosswalk every time.
I've lost count of the cars that speed up to beat the countdown timer.
It is useful for my 5 AM commute though, when there's not a soul around, and I have to turn left. If I come to it and the timer hasn't started I'll do a right-on-red and then u-turn on the main road.
My main love for these buttons is the fact that I can trigger them with my elbow or hip whenever my hands a full with shopping bags etc. I like the mushy way they depress then seemingly inflate back into place...
It's often better for pedestrians when there's a button. Because the light usually changes pretty quickly after pressing the button. Otherwise you'd have to wait until the timer switches the lights.
It's usually used for pedestrian crossings where pedestrians are rather rare.
Sometimes people stand at intersections and just chat and don't want to cross. And in Germany and Hungary where I used such buttons, they are definitely not placebo, because the switch comes quickly and when you forget to press it it does not switch.
Intersections where cars have to pass detectors (induction coils in the ground) to get a green light exist. Same principle: only switch the lights if there is demand for it, with a default oriented at the most likely demand.
The pedestrian-default at least around here is implemented by making entire zones slow-driving and pedestrian-priority, not on single intersections. If cars are allowed higher speeds, it IMHO makes sense to have pedestrians push the button and wait a few seconds, since they can do that easier and more efficient.
I'm sure there's many answers, but one would be that it's hard to determine a pedestrian's intent to cross. A vehicle at an intersection, in the right lane - yep, you can be fairly sure its intent is to cross. A pedestrian hanging around one end of a zebra crossing can be waiting for a green light, grabbing a smoke, chatting to a friend or playing Pokémon Go for all you know. There's no good way of automatically knowing that they intend to cross.
Because some intersections are programmed to maximize vehicle traffic throughput, and only allow pedestrian crossing in response to pushing the button.
we've lost the meaning of the word when we describe this banal traffic button as "beautiful". In my opinion, if anything, the photo, and indeed the entire article web page, is quite ugly.
- They have distinct ticking sounds for: locating them (slow tick), when the button has been succesfully pressed (slightly faster tick), when you can walk (very fast tick) , when the traffic light will turn red soon (intermittent fast tick) so you know to hurry up and then back to the normal slow tick.
- They have a ring of leds around the button that lights up when you've pressed it and then counts down by turning of the leds one by one to when the light is gonna turn green.
- The ticking can be felt through the entire pole
- Often there are two traffic lights on it. One big one above and a smaller one at eye-level.
Here's a button that shows the wait-indicator ring:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/95/Tr...
They're not available everywhere unfortunately.