New Yorkers are less than pleased, it seems, to discover that a lot of the Walk/Don’t-Walk buttons on traffic signals around the city haven’t been working for years — intentionally.
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.
[…] Most of the buttons scattered through the city, mainly outside of Manhattan, are relics of the 1970’s, before computers began tightly choreographing traffic signal patterns on major arteries. They were installed at a time when traffic was much lighter, said Michael Primeggia, deputy commissioner of traffic operations for the city’s Transportation Department.
[…] By the late 1980’s, most of the buttons had been deactivated, their steel exteriors masking the lie within. But city officials say they do not remember ever publishing an obituary, and the white and black signs stayed up, many of them looking as new and official as ever.
On the bright side, there are evidently 750 locations where the buttons do actually work — and, in fact, are necessary for the signal to ever allow pedestrians to cross. And it’s easy to understand why, at $400 an intersection, there is no big rush to replace signs outside of construction projects.
And in the bigger scheme of things, [Primeggia] said, it doesn’t really matter if people push a working button. “The public is going to get the walk signal regardless,” he said. “I guess that’s the point. There’s no harm in having it at the locations.”
Well, aside from that nagging feeling that some traffic control computer somewhere is laughing hysterically at you …
(via Blather)
Well, it’s not as if people know how to use them anyway. I always want to holler at the people who keep the button pushed in the whole time they stand there, or who press it 147 times, as if that will let the signal know they’re in a hurry, and it’ll change sooner. Dolts.
That goes right along with pressing the elevator button multiple times. “Maybe it will make the elevator car go faster!”
You know, I was going to include elevators in my mini-rant. Changed my mind at the last minute. Not sure why.
Is there a list of the 750 locations where the buttons actually DO work?
All that’s in the article:
There are 750 locations where the buttons actually do work, Mr. Primeggia said. Some of them have been installed more recently, while others are holdovers from two decades ago. The working buttons are only at intersections where the walk signal will never come unless the button is pushed or a car trips the sensor, Mr. Primeggia said. He cited two examples, one at Hicks and Summitt Streets in Brooklyn and the other on Flatbush Avenue just south of the Belt Parkway exit ramp. But other working push buttons are hard to find. A random survey of more than 30 intersections in Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan found one, at Marathon Parkway and 51st Avenue in Little Neck, Queens, that worked.
Presumably the Dept of Transportation keeps a list — though I wouldn’t necessarily count on it.