Pedestrian buttons and ped lights are one of the biggest jokes traffic engineers have ever done and who ever promoted and signed off on current designs standards should be shot or at least publicly ridiculed for such an affront on
Intelligent design flop #2 – User Interface & Queuing
By way of an example lets design calling for elevator the same way as a pedestrian calls for a crossing light. So to get an elevator call button up to speed we need to first remove all visual feedback clues, no light that comes on when you press a button and no floor indicators.
Next we need to install a queue timer to maximize efficiency of the elevator and allow sufficient time for people to gather on the floor being served, that is to say make people wait at least a minute and half before an elevator even starts to move to their floor. Efficiency of the elevator is of the utmost importance which makes queuing also the utmost importance so even if the elevator is already on the floor people must wait, so have the elevator serve other floors before serving the floor it was resting on. (If you pressed a ped button just after the main light turned green you have to wait a full cycle for the green ped light to come on.)
Intelligent design flop #3 oldId.20071206205708315
Intelligent design flop #1 – Button location
Lets put the button on a poll next to the curb so cyclists can call for the light as well. And lets make this button activate the light to the cyclists left and not the one going straight.
One of these exist on the Baltimore & Annapolis Trail at the second traffic control light that you encounter riding south on the trail.
Another type of button is what I call the “placebo” button. You push it, but nothing really happens. It controls nothing. You are at the mercy of some sort of timing system that the button has zero influence on–or so it seems.
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iodaniell
In Baltimore 36% of our traffic fatalities involve pedestrians. The combination of frustrating call buttons, the lack of enforcement of pedestrian right of way and our stupid conflicting laws that says it is the duty of the pedestrian to yield and it is the duty of the motorist to yield but not if the pedestrian has a red ped signal (which they may or may not be successful in getting) results in extremely hazardous conditions for pedestrians.