Australian traffic button pushes beautiful design

http://www.tragicdesign.com/blog/bad-design/tell-me-when-to-...

Cars can spot them as they drive and try to run yellows more often.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

But, then again, I live on a college campus which has higher standards for accessibility than most areas in the US.

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.

in vic many have a red light to appease feeble primate minds.

> so pedestrians will stand there mashing over

that's because the faster you pad mash it the quicker the lights change :D

> the smaller metal lozenge at the top

if you push and hold it really hard you can cause the start of the crossing sound be a loud squelch

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 vaguely remember reading/hearing somewhere that it's a disability aid - I believe it vibrates or something similar when the walk signal is lit.

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.

Far from 'pants on head idiotic', rather it's 'decent design that could be a bit better'.

I've never seen the buttons with a light in it - maybe NSW just never used them?

The "smaller metal lozenge" vibrates for the blind (and headphone wearing), plus provides direction. I've never seen people use it in confusion.

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...

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.

Some rare lights stay red forever if you don't activate the thing. As for the others I also think they are placebo.

One time I saw on one of these buttons, the yellow circle with the three black dots [1], which is the identifier for blind people.

1 : http://digitalcosmonaut.com/2013/berlin-traffic-lights-youre...

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."

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!

Pretty much describes a lot of the pedestrian crossings here in the UK.

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.

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.

Details here: http://www.scats.com.au/

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.

It's usually used for pedestrian crossings where pedestrians are rather rare.