Placebo buttons: 'door-close' buttons, others, don't do anything | Hacker News Reader

Placebo buttons: 'door-close' buttons, others, don't do anything

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" 'In most elevators installed since the early 1990s, the 'close door' button has no effect. Otis Elevator engineers confirmed the fact to the Wall Street Journal in 2003. "

Interesting. In a previous career I worked at a hotel and had, as part of my job, a "fireman's service" key. Very handy thing.

Elevator banks in NYC offices and hotels have a key slot that, when activated, pulls all the elevators to the lobby. You're supposed to only do this in an emergency, such as a fire.

While the elevators are set to fireman's service, the same key (well, a duplicate, if yours is the one that was used to pull the elevators) is used inside an elevator to control it.

While on fireman's service the doors will not open unless you press the "open" button. If you take the car to a fire floor you really don't want the doors opening on their own.

You have to press and hold the "open" button until they are fully open; also handy in case you start to open the doors and start inhaling smoke.

Likewise, once open, the doors don't close unless you press and hold the "close" button.

I'm pretty sure that once you closed the doors the car automatically returned to the lobby.

Bottom line is, not every control you see on some equipment or machine is meant for everyone to use.

If you click through to the original wsj article this was all shamelessly stripped from, the actual statement is that the open and close door buttons are ONLY activated by the fireman's key. So it does serve a purpose, just not for most people.

One of the huge reasons for manual door control in fires is that the IR sensor to detect if something is blocking the door can't tell the difference between a person and smoke. Door opens up on a burning floor, smoke pours in, door refuses to shut, everyone gets stuck and dies.

To the non-firefighters, this is why there are so many signs telling you do take the stairs. Power failures too.

The designers of some elevators include a hidden feature that is very handy if you’re in a hurry or it’s a busy time in the building (like check-out time in a hotel). While some elevators require a key, others can be put into 'Express' mode by pressing the 'Door Close' and 'Floor' buttons at the same time. This sweeps the car to the floor of your choice and avoids stops at any other floor.

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifehack/elevatorlift-hacki...

I wonder how much truth there is in this.

"In 2004 the New York Times reported that more than 2,500 of the 3,250 "walk" buttons in New York intersections do nothing. "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."

And what do you expect them to do? Since only 2/3rds do nothing, how is the pedestrian to know which 2/3rds that is? They have no choice but to always push the button.

Why don't they remove the inactive buttons?

It's probably more expensive than just snipping the wires.

Why would they even bother to do that? Just deactivate the buttons in software.

I don't think those buttons were driven by anything we would consider "software."

Do you mind explaining? I can't tell if this is meant as a joke or a serious counter-argument. At any rate I assume there is some sort of firmware controlling the lights [edit: guess not, read juson's comment below], monitoring the buttons/ induction loops, etc. and the easiest way (to my mind) to disable to buttons would be to disable them in this software and have the system stop monitoring them. However if you have any insight into how the lights work that would be great.

hey kgermino,

Sorry to butt into the convo, but I was a summer intern at a major "traffic light" operation (for lack of a better term) in the southeast (aka, they did all of the traffic lights and systems for the southeast USA). It will seem almost shocking to many here on HN, but the traffic control industry is lagging behind drastically.

I believe the newer systems started going IP based just a few years ago, and (gasp) wireless networking of traffic lights is a really new thing. It has to do with the environment the system must handle and how "tamper-proof" it must be, which leads to hardware and software being waaayy behind the curve.

The main point though, is that it would be very reasonable to think that some hardware, especially if installed before the 90s, wouldn't have "software" to just "turn off monitoring". Even the newer boxes aren't completely controlled by software, they have physical circuitry that operates as a "fall-back" to make sure that things like two green lights on adjacent roads can't be green at the same time, even if the software was hacked, had a bug, etc.

Interesting. For whatever reason it didn't even occur to me that traffic lights would still have a "hard-wired" circuit available to operate the lights. I'm a Computer/Electrical but I tend to think in terms of coding rather than being able to solve problems with circuits. But that's interesting and makes me think I should look into an internship/coop in that area. Thanks

Even moreso than that, many of the lights in New York still run on genuine relays. You can easily hear them at many street corners in Manhattan, happily thunking away. (The New York Subway is also still powered almost exclusively by relays, even to do complex things like monitor train speed. It's both impressive and disturbing to see what they were able to accomplish a hundred years ago without modern computing hardware.)

Any recommended links on where one could read more on the NY Subway systems you mention? I'm fascinated by pre-electronic computing, and this sounds like a particularly interesting example.

It's still insulting.

I'd be far more insulted if the city spent $2 million [Made up Number] it doesn't have removing buttons that did no harm to anyone.

Why not spend almost nothing to put some sort of notice on the button that it's no longer useful?

"almost nothing" would still equate to sever thousand dollars, probably over $100k. Not to mention future costs, a sticker would probably need to be replaced after a year at most, and a sign would cost significantly more. If you decide to just put them up and let them be there's a high likelihood of vandalism or damage that isn't attractive. All for signs that many people probably wouldn't notice. Again it just doesn't seem that letting people know the buttons do nothing is worth the money that it costs.

The buttons are almost certainly a disease vector. I'd hardly say they aren't causing harm.

Well, because the point of the article(s) was that the user feels happier if they feel they have control. Besides which people would complain if they physically removed the buttons. Leaving them inactive means nobody is the wiser, and everyone gets on with their lives.

If someone pushes the button and the door doesn't close immediately I wouldn't say nobody is the wiser. More likely, someone just caught the common cold for no reason.

Removing 2,500 or more buttons throughout the city would require a lot of man-hours, transporting, storing and disposing of the old buttons. There would also be wiring to remove or block off, cover plates to be made, distributed and installed. And hopefully some sort of communication to the entire population of the city including visitors to explain why the buttons are going away.

It says in one of the linked articles it would cost roughly $400 per unit. That's $1,000,000 right there.

Because having a button there, even if it isn't active, reduces the number of people who will walk when they shouldn't, because they think that the light will change sooner because they pushed the button.

No, it increases the number of jaywalkers. If you know that the light is on a timer and you will have your turn in 15 seconds, you have little reason not to wait the 15 seconds. But if you have to press a button for something, you deserve quick response to the button push, and if it doesn't come quickly, you give up in disgust and cross against the light.

Even when those buttons DO work they aren't instantaneous. You presume a world where pedestrians have almost no patience. A more likely scenario is that people start pushing the button more and more trying to get it to work before they "give up in disgust".

Another way to interpret the disabled walk buttons is to say that pushing the button N times is N times as effective as pushing it only once!

What I find odd is the crosswalks here in DC where there's sign that says "Pedistrian MUST push button to cross." Yet it's not true. The button does not appear to do anything and a walk signal definitely comes up even if you don't push it.

Existential. Push button anyway. The other way lies nihilism.

No.. no... don't push the button. It's the only way not to be sure.

Have you tested to see if the delay is diminished? There are so few of those I can't imagine they're placebos. When I lived at GWU I can only remember the ones across Pennsylvania, and everything else was automatic.

I haven't done controlled experiments, but anecdotally it makes absolutely no difference.

What I find odd is the crosswalks here in DC where there's sign that says "Pedistrian MUST push button to cross." Yet it's not true.

Actually, it is true at some of them. If you don't press the walk button at some of them, the walk light doesn't turn on and the light is on red for a shorter period of time.

Incidentally, the door close button does work in Japan. And you can cancel erroneous floor selections.

(The funny part is that the elevators are made by the same companies that make them for the US market. But they seem to be "updated technology" rather than the 1930s-holdovers that we have today.)

The most modern elevator system I've used is the one at the new Bank of America Tower. You type the number of the floor you want to go to on a keypad, then the display tells you which elevator to take. You go in, and there are no buttons at all. It seems cumbersome, but it really does seem to reduce waiting time. (And annoying people that hold the elevator for all their friends. These elevators just smash the offender, solving the problem for good.)

In my building the elevator doesn't even know to return to the lobby when idle :(

Returning to the lobby means you're in the right place half the time (roughly -- I for one use the elevator to go up more than to go down). Anywhere else has much worse odds.

Many buildings with multiple evelators are programmed to return to a stagger position, so all of the idle elevators are at least one floor apart if not evenly distributed across the whole height of the building. The closest idle elevator responds to a call button.

This is easiest to observe in builds with glass elevators.

SimTower was a great elevator simulator. If you spend any amount of time with the game you realize that a staggered approach is more efficient.

It's too bad there aren't more games in the genre. It might be fun to experiment with more types of traffic flow and programmable elevators.

It may be more convenient for the end-user, but it would raise running costs significantly.

If the elevator is needed at the lobby 50% of the time, means it is also needed elsewhere 50% of the time. It means that 50% of the time the lift is travelling to the lobby and then back to a needed floor empty. If it only moves when called then it only ever travels the difference between its end point and new start point which is AT MOST the number of floors in the building.

If every floor is accessed equally (as you'd expect), then 50% of the time the elevator needs to travel half the height of the building (on average) TWICE when it goes into idle state. The average of this method is equal to the maximum of the other...or something.

....but then I haven't had my morning coffee yet.

In most high-rise buildings, the stairs are not usable for normal travel (evacuation only). So people go up as often as they go down.

Haven't seen an Otis in Tokyo yet. Not that I look very closely. Lots of Mitsubishis.

Every time an article like this gets posted, I'm a little surprised that there is no mention whatsoever about the international angle. "the close door button doesn't work," [IN the US].

Many elevators in Tokyo simply will not close until someone presses close.

Many close-door buttons that appear to do nothing only do nothing if the natural cycle has not been interrupted. I've seen ones where if you press the open-door button to interrupt a door closing, then the close-door button becomes functional and causes an immediate door close.

I agree, I've also noticed the elevators in my office building are on a schedule and behave differently during business hours than evening and early morning hours.

Maybe it's for the convenience of the after-hours cleaning staff, but after 7PM the close door button can even make the door close before it finishes opening upon arriving at a floor.

This reminds me why I don't slashdot anymore. By the fourth comment there's an extensive argument over universal health care.

EDIT: irony noted.

Don't worry, before too long the same argument will appear here.

Australia has universal health care btw.... just saying :P

I don't read Slashdot comments because of the repetitive or off topic jokes that add nothing productive to the conversation.

Interestingly enough, I enjoy Slashdot for exactly that reason (and the occasional insightful comment). I haven't found any other place on the net (yet?) with such witty geek humor.

I gave up Slashdot after a long time because of the predictable jokes, but do miss the genuinely clever ones. If the funny filter could somehow determine the difference between the clever stuff and the memes (or if there were two moderation options to separate them), it might be more useful.

There's some way to filter out any posts upmodded as Funny, iirc. I think that would make it much more readable too.

In Soviet Russia, off-topic jokes add nothing productive to YOU.

Sorry, I couldn't resist.

A key word missing from the HN title is "most." Most door-close buttons don't work, most pedestrian walkways buttons don't work, but some do, and it's very easy to test which ones do.

They aren't all placebos.

What's an easy way to test if a pedestrian-walk button works? I think this would actually take a lot of work to chart time-to-walk with/without button presses. Elevator door-close buttons would be easier, assuming that the doors is supposed to close immediately after pressing the button.

At least where I live, the non-placebo buttons have an immediate effect - press, and the walk light will change to a blinking don't-walk hand, which then turns to solid as the corresponding traffic light turns yellow/red.

Interesting. Based on your anecdote, I'm pretty sure I've never encountered a functional push-to-walk button...

Here this would only be the case if the traffic had already been flowing for a certain minimum amount of time.

That's not how it works generally (that only works at low traffic intersections). More typically, the walk button registers that there is a pedestrian wishing to cross, without which the system skips over the pedestrian phase of the traffic cycle. This is less important in big cities where it is assumed there is nearly always a pedestrian waiting to cross, which is presumably why they were disabled in NYC. However, in this mode of operation the only way to test whether the button is functional or not is to not press it and see if a full traffic cycle is completed sans pedestrian crossing.

Incidentally, I worked in a building this summer with a working door-close button in the elevator, and it was immensely satisfying.

You'd notice. The pedestrian green light wouldn't go green for several cycles of car lights. And, on the other extreme, I've seen lights that go green almost immediately after pressing the button.

Does the Pedestrian Walk signal come on if you _don't_ push the button, I mean, _ever_ - if it doesn't, and then comes on immediately after pushing the button - you've found a working button. It only takes one cycle through the vehicle traffic lights (and zero, obviously, in a pedestrian controlled intersection) to determine which is which.

Toronto recently setup a series of really obnoxious lights where lights in one direction (these are only at intersections of a major and much more minor street, and usually only during off hours) will only change if either the car presence sensor, or the pedestrian button is hit. Now, this is annoying enough as it is, but what makes it worse, is that the countdown on the pedestrian lights keep counting down as if normal.

So, let's say your tired, or really drunk at say midnight. You wait at the light waiting to cross a major road. You see the light count down from 14 or whatever down to 0... and then it stays red! It just starts a whole new traffic cycle until some car comes along, or you remember to hit the damn button.

Worse design ever. Drunk icegreentea has probably tried to rip disassemble one of those boxes with trusty multitool more than once.

I know of one example of this from the Lyndon B. Johnson vice presidency (1961-63):

His Air Force Two aircraft, SAM 970 [0], has a fake temperature switch in the presidential stateroom. The staff had it installed after they got sick of him coming up to the cockpit and fiddling with the temperature controls.

[0] http://www.museumofflight.org/aircraft/boeing-vc-137b-707-12...

Isn't the interface there for "Fireman mode?"

In most elevators, at least in any built or installed since the early nineties, the door-close button doesn’t work. It is there mainly to make you think it works. (It does work if, say, a fireman needs to take control. But you need a key, and a fire, to do that.)

From: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/04/21/080421fa_fact_...

See also Design With Intent: http://architectures.danlockton.co.uk/2008/10/01/placebo-but...

You don't even need a fire... just a key...

I'm a firefighter/EMT in upstate New York. We use an elevator key from time to time to hold an elevator if we know we're going to need that elevator to move a patient in a few minutes (in addition to other "fire related" uses like actual fires, fire alarms, and elevator mechanical issues).

It's not such a big secret that most elevator close buttons don't work: if you push them, nothing happens. That's not too hard to figure out on your own. And which, by the way, annoys me greatly and causes quite the opposite of a "feeling of control" in me, as it rather demonstrates my lack of control! (Also, in the back of my head I hear the elevator company laughing at me in a Nelson kind of "Ha! Ha!".)

What is it about those three to five seconds between chosing your floor and the door closing that makes them feel like three to five hours? I suppose it's because we use elevators so frequently that all these seconds start adding up to some actual time wasted without any reason.

I too feel a lack of control and frustration from the fact that walk signals (such as across 3rd St in SF) and elevator "close" buttons obviously do nothing. Perhaps it's my Aspergers/geek thing, but I feel patronized by the fake buttons.

On of my favorite things about traveling to places like Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong, etc. is that the close door buttons work. It's ridiculous, I know, but I feel like it points to some sort of cultural difference.

I recently finished developing a simple news app for the iPhone. I wanted to reduce the overhead of the app as much as possible and I wanted a refresh feature but I didn't want the user to have the ability to receive news updates from my service at his will. So I made the cache only expire after 15 minutes. When the user clicks the refresh button within 15 minutes of a previous click it actually does nothing, but display an activity indicator for 2 hard coded seconds. This isn't for critical news updates. Just very slow niche news updates. It's my most recent version of a placebo button.

The door close button in my previous apartment worked. Then again the door stayed open for an unreasonably (for a guy in his 20's) long time because of the number of elderly people in the building.

My previous building in Miami had it connected, but possibly to allow more capacity per elevator. Four elevators is not enough for 21 floors of ten units each.

James Gleick explores this theme in his very enjoyable book Faster, as part of a broader look at the accelerating pace of modern life.

For the interested, the book's website is at http://fasterbook.com/ and the chapter about door close buttons is here: http://fasterbook.com/cgi-bin/faster/fchapter.pl?3

I heard somewhere that in the UK, the buttons for crossing the road react faster if you mash them, the idea being that it's most likely a child. I've never tested it, it's always seemed rather rude to give the cars a shorter phase. (god, that's such a British way of thinking)

In Hong Kong the 'close' buttons really do work in the majority of elevators and they show at least 50 times more wear and tear than any other button.

It shows how damn impatient we are in HK.

In Singapore, most elevator door close buttons work. It's very civilized and one of the small delights of living here.

In my previous apartment there was a strange, doorbell-like button in the middle of one of the walls. I pressed it once in a while, but it never seemed to do anything.

It also seemed very unlikely that the floorplan of the building had ever put a door near it, so I'm guessing it was a placebo button for some previous resident.

It may have once rung a bell to call a maid.

Could have been a button for a now walled-up dumbwaiter. ISTR that there was one in the NYC apartment I grew up in.

I have a switch in my apartment... it doesn't do anything.... Every once in a while, I turn it on and off.... One day I got a call... it was from a woman in France.... She said "Cut it out"....

-- Stephen Wright

I've heard that this is also true of all of the pedestrian buttons at traffic lights in central London, though I've never seen an official confirmation.

People like to feel in control, but not the responsibility that comes with the power. This looks like a (dishonest) way to combine both tendencies.

The door close button not working annoys me less than not being able to deselect selected floors. We've all had that idiot "friend".

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