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Comment by camillomiller | Hacker News Reader

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.

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"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!

Here ( in Berlin ) some of the pseudo-buttons are actually made for the blind. They have the same shape as the working ones but do nothing.

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 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.

"..here in Berlin I get the impression that they're just some placebo to limit your impatience.."

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

There's a button below the casing, try it next time.

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

> 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.

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