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Comment by JustinSeriously | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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