NY crosswalk buttons are placebos

Crosswalk buttons are fake. You suspect it. You know it in your gut. And in New York City, you are correct.

Brian Sidlo in Australia pointed me to a great New York Times article from 2004 that tells the story of crosswalk buttons in New York City. Nearly all of them are mechanical placebos. Pushing the button doesn’t do diddly. It only makes you feel good. And it works! You get results. Sure enough, when the light turns green, the crosswalk signal says Walk. You controlled the traffic. “The sign says push, so I push.”

The deception wasn’t intentional, we hope. The crosswalk buttons were installed in the 1970s, before we figured how to use the fancy new computers to control traffic in more than one intersection at a time. But by the late 1980s, most of them were disconnected, rendered superfluous by automated traffic patterns.

The city deactivated most of the pedestrian buttons long ago with the emergence of computer-controlled traffic signals, even as an unwitting public continued to push on, according to city Department of Transportation officials. More than 2,500 of the 3,250 walk buttons that still exist function essentially as mechanical placebos, city figures show. Any benefit from them is only imagined.

And yet, people still push. Why? Because they’re there. They ask to be pushed. “To cross street, push button. Wait for walk signal.” The crosswalk button offers the magic of stopping time so that you can cross the street. Stop the flow of city life, for you.

Crosswalks are fascinating on their own. Who has the priority, the right of way? The car or the pedestrian? Can the philosophy of a city be summed up in its preference for cars or walkers? Preferring cars means that business has to be done. You have to go from here to there. There’s stuff to be done! Preferring walkers means you value neighborhoods. Everything is close enough to get your stuff done by walking. Or simply just enjoy the day and get out on your own two legs.

The crosswalk button is a civilized way to balance the car and the walker. Emphasizing either extreme has its problems. Focus on the car, and you get Los Angeles, a crazy sprawl where it takes 45 minutes to get anywhere. At the other extreme, we have an intersection here in Portland where the walkers rule. SE 37th and Hawthorne, where the Bagdad Theater is. In most major cities, its size would be a minor side street. But the way Portland has developed, this is a significant corner with a lot of foot traffic. People cross any time they want, whether the light is red or green, as if its the car driver’s responsibility to watch out for the walkers. I never understood this. Right of way is irrelevant in car vs. pedestrian. Protecting your own skull is paramount. What good is “I had the right of way” when you’re in the hospital with a fractured skull?

Oh wait. We were talking about buttons.

The crosswalk button offered a civilized balance. “Hey, it’s my turn.” “Okay, hang on a second. Let me let a few more cars go by … okay, go for it.” This makes sense only in medium-sized intersections where foot traffic is common but not constant. In New York City, almost every intersection is major. It’s guaranteed that someone needs to cross the street in every direction at every intersection at all times. When you get this big, you might as well build the Walk cycle into the traffic flow. Regularity is the best thing for smooth traffic. Providing a consistent Walk cycle at all intersections helps this.

So when New York City evolved in size, they automated the Walk cycle for most intersections, but left the crosswalk buttons behind. It makes sense. Removing thousands of buttons would be expensive. They just remove them if other construction is going on and its easy to do.

This leaves us with almost 3000 fake crosswalk buttons that we still push. Why? As a four-year old in the article correctly pointed out, “because it’s fun.” The button promises action (the running theme of The History of the Button) and always provides it. Every time you push the crosswalk button, the Walk sign still shows up. Does it matter if it’s manual or automated? Do you have to actually control the universe, or is the illusion good enough? I’d like to think that the next time I’m in New York, even though I know it won’t do anything, I’ll still push the button. Because it’s fun.

Now if we can only figure out why some people think that pushing crosswalk buttons five times in a row will make it go faster.