The secret button at pedestrian crossings | Hacker News Reader

The secret button at pedestrian crossings

bbc.co.uk

212 pointsmorphics111 comments

A good friend of mine had an amazing experience showing what blind people are capable of. He overheard a middle aged man who had obviously been blind for a long time schooling a young girl who had recently gone blind on how to get around. They were standing on one side of the road in a quiet neighborhood, and the man was teaching the girl how to assess the distance across the road. The way he did this was absolutely incredible: tap the cane on the curb, and you can hear the echo from the curb and buildings across the road. With experience you can hear how far it is.

Awesome related article that made the rounds a while ago http://www.mensjournal.com/magazine/the-blind-man-who-taught...

Right after college I volunteered at a social centre in the UK for blind and partially sighted people. One elderly completely blind man used to like to play darts.

He was pretty good at it after a little initial steering and feedback.

He could have cleaned up on The Golden Shot

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Shot

There is (or was, at least) a group of blind mountain bikers who used echolocation to estimate obstacles in their path. I was floored when I read the article[1] about them; that ability always sounded like a superpower to me.

[1]: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/sensory-superpowers/2009...

That would be the movie/comic book hero "Daredevil"

A few years ago, Paul McCartney performed at the White House. Toward the end of "Hey Jude", where there were a lot of people up on stage singing the "Na na na na..." part, McCartney accidentally knocked over a mic stand while crossing the stage back to his piano. Stevie Wonder, who was standing nearby, shot his hand out and caught the falling mic stand.

Here's a video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3OC_mKo2Fk#t=341s

Link to relevant place in video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3OC_mKo2Fk&t=341s

(Somewhere along the way the & in the parent's URL turned into #)

FYI it still works as a named anchor.

For interest, I have now tested Chrome, Safari and Firefox on my machine (OSX), and of those the named anchor only works in Firefox. Strange.

The named anchor works for me in Chrome 27, but I appreciate learning the query string parameter method too.

Interesting. I tested it in Firefox v.21 and Chrome v.27 (on Windows) and it works in both.

For what it's worth, it also works on Opera 12 for PC.

Blinness is a spectrum, though. To be legally blind I don't think you have to have 0% vision in both eyes.

I'd be more inclined to believe Stevie has some residual vision, rather than he was using echo location.

He used his ears. Stevie Wonder's retinas are not attached to his optic nerve.

It's not echo location, though. It's far easier to pinpoint where a sound is coming from than to echo locate; sighted people can do it, too.

On viewing the video your description is a little generous. He did hear it and put his hand out, but it would have fallen without help. Not really like the cane echo distancing.

I'm actually not convinced that he's reaching out to catch the falling mic. To me it looks more like Paul McCartney is running by, touching him and he reaches out as a reaction to that touch. The mic then just happens to fall into his arm. But that's just my interpretation.

Also, a life music concert is incredibly loud. I think even for a trained man it would be extremely difficult (if not impossible) to hear the falling microphone. I find the cane against curb example much more realistic.

There are some blind people who use echolocation to remarkable degrees. Take for example this boy who's able to rollerblade in the streets, bypassing moving vehicles using echolocation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1QaCeosUmw.

It's a skill most people can learn. With enough practice you can judge distances based on sound.

When I was young my parents had a smooth railing with posts that stuck up above it. I used to slide my head on my arms along it with my eyes closed. I could hear when the post would get close and stop. I don't know the maximum distance humans can detect by sound but it's pretty easy for short distances.

I'll look for those here in Minnesota, but I don't think those have been installed yet. The intersection near my home that I reach on walking trips to shop, a busy intersection between a state highway and a county highway, had all of the pedestrian crossings upgraded in the last two years. The traffic light poles include pressable buttons that activate a spoken word warning to walk or not walk, with the spoken phrases about which street to cross making clear which direction has the pedestrian right of way. This is out in the outer ring suburbs. The intersection is, I think, in the top ten statewide for largest number of traffic accidents each year (motor vehicle to motor vehicle, mostly, but some involving pedestrians too I think).

In the downtown of Minneapolis, weather has suggested a different solution since the 1960s. Minneapolis has an extensive network of "skyways," covered bridges at second-story level between buildings,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minneapolis_Skyway_System

http://www.skywaymyway.com/

and those are so used now that many businesses think a skyway-level location inside a building is more valuable than a street-level location. There is no issue of a pedestrian running into car traffic at skyway level, and no issue of slipping on snow or ice, which was the original reason for the skyway system.

> The traffic light poles include pressable buttons that activate a spoken word warning to walk or not walk, with the spoken phrases about which street to cross making clear which direction has the pedestrian right of way.

That same button vibrates when it becomes safe to walk.

> I'll look for those here in Minnesota, but I don't think those have been installed yet.

Given that they were invented in UK, are made by a UK company and recommended by a UK government agency, this is not much of a surprise.

I was hoping it would be a button to instantly change the lights in your favour, now there is a button I would use.

I'd hoped for the same! :D

Ah, that would be something different: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_signal_preemption

Some of the systems have been hackable/hacked by non-authorized users. There's been stories every so often here on HN.

That's what the headline subeditors are paid for

What I've always wanted - and what might be more mutually beneficial - is a button to cancel the crossing request. E.g. for all those times you press the button, then realise there's enough time to safely cross without the lights changing.

This is actually one of the reasons I never hit the crossing signal in walkable zones: I feel it's rude when I could simply pay a little more attention and cross quickly without taking up others' time.

However, there are lights that do not ever open up to pedestrian crossing unless you hit the button, which irritates me.

A Puffin - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffin_crossing may have a near-side detector, that will cancel the demand if you move way from the crossing. i.e. have crossed in the gap.

Certain traffic lights in the UK have something like that. If you flash your lights (at night) as you approach they will change. It's sometimes used where a minor road crosses a major one. At night the lights are configured to stay green for the major road, until either: a) a vehicle is sensed waiting at the minor road's stop line; b) a flash of light detected from the direction of the minor road.

The crossing of the A60 into Rempstone is one such example.

No they don't and no it isn't.

Lights in the US have buttons that you can press. But they don't always work. There's one light in Cambrige, MA, that, as far as I could tell, never ever said WALK.

This traffic light is great:

https://www.google.com/maps?ll=41.869753,-87.648017&spn=...

It turns red immediately when you press the button. When I was in college, I would entertain myself between classes by going over, pressing the button just as the upstream light turned green and cars began accelerating, and then not crossing the street.

This, incidentally, is probably why most lights don't change immediately.

Just something curious while "walking around" ... https://www.google.com/maps?ll=41.869635,-87.648258&spn=... Banshee from Halo? Hint: cross side to side (following parent link) of street looking to sky

Almost all lights here in Christchurch have buttons to request that the lights change, except for a few like https://www.google.com/maps?ll=-43.553027,172.663193&spn... where the button does nothing, and you have to stand on the yellow pad until the lights change, or have a metal bike.

Not everyone understands that you need to keep standing on the pad, or that the bike crossing doesn’t last long enough to walk all the way across.

I am a traffic signal engineer. They don't.

They may have a detector (ir-red/mircowave/inductive loop) that detects your approach. At night, as they may be no conflicting demands - the side road will change Green ASAP.

Do they, or did they used to, have light sensors to detect emergency vehicles coming through? Perhaps that was just an urban myth.

Me too. Does anyone know if kipkay's method actually works?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1cgE2GaFko

I remember trying out that same code back in highschool, say 5-6 years ago. My friend made fun of me so much for believing it would work. I was disappointed. Not to say it's not true, but it didn't work when I tried it!

All the pedestrian crossing buttons in NYC (I assume other places as well) have been disabled since all the lights are run together by algorithms now.

If only it were true. Most of the country is rushing ruinously toward actuation.

Only a few cities (notably New York, San Francisco, Chicago) believe in pedestrians.

Boulder, CO has taken pedestrian safety to absolutely ridiculous levels: http://www.bouldercolorado.gov/index.php?option=com_content&...

You can know if someone is crossing a street in Boulder from Denver :)

"Hugh Huddy is blind and works for visual impairment charities' umbrella group Vision 2020. He says he is always pleased to see a cone on a crossing"

Blind people I know use the verb themselves — and joke about it.

We had a presentation by a pair of UI design consultants, both blind, showing us how they used a computer. Their use of phrases related to seeing (that we take for granted) managed to catch the attention a lot more - and they cracked puns at it all the time.

In France there's a button at the same location that activates a (very annoying and very loud) bell sound when it's safe to cross. Needless to say I've seen it mostly used by curious/bored non-blind people.

In NZ there's a vibrating nubbin thing plus a "safe to cross" noise.

The most evil thing in the world would be to play the "it's safe to cross" noise continuously on your car stereo :/

Depends where you are, and how old the crossing is.

(from memory)

The older type has a small needle on the bottom that vibrates/jabs you.

But the newer crossing have the larger larger buttons. Which have an electrical(?) panel on the direction arrow. like: http://www.sunlive.co.nz/assets/images/site/110520-crossing-...

In some cities in Australia, the box beeps. It beeps when you should wait, and then a different beep when you can walk. As a person that can see, you get so used to this that you really miss it. It is great for so many reasons, I have caught people before just about to walk into traffic because they thought it was ok to go.

The beeping while you wait is likely so you can find the box itself. It also has a small tactile strip -- which vibrates as it beeps -- and which will always point in the direction of the crossing -- just to help orient you.

That's not a button.

You're right. We should stop calling anything a button which is not used to fasten cloth via a buttonhole, even if the entire English-speaking world uses the term euphemistically to refer to round things.

It's more like a spinning toothpaste lid. I wouldn't call that a button, even if it is round. And I can think of a lot of other round things which make no sense being called a button.

Which English speaking world are you from? Because fasteners and 'things you push' yeah. Round things in general though? no. Knob maybe... maybe.

I'm from the US. The article was from the BBC. So that's two English-speaking countries.

In the US, of course, there are other buttons than push-buttons and clothing-buttons. Belly buttons for example. "Pin-back buttons" are usually just called buttons. Cornflowers are sometimes known as "Bachelor's button." You can of course use the term as an adjective -- button mushrooms, a button nose -- and you can refer to that indented mat that stops you from falling in the shower as a "button mat." If I described a "button mouse" to you, as opposed to a mouse button, you would probably come up with a visual image of a trackpoint mouse -- though you might also imagine a normal mouse covered with too many interaction buttons. The word "button" can also be used for things which are just generally small and globular and attached to other things -- you can find many search results for "button of rubber" and somewhat fewer for "button of glass" which fit this description.

My understanding of British English is that they would not call something a "knob" in polite company. Americans (and I am one) think nothing of it. So, there are a decent amount of words with slightly different meanings throughout the English speaking world.

Plenty of British English speakers would use the word "knob", for example I have no idea what I would call the knobs on the cooker other than knobs.

Or the knobs on amplifiers, or door knobs - well I suppose door handle works but door knobs are distinctly different from handles in my mind.

dial :)

Hmm yes perhaps, I tend to think of a dial as part of a measurement device. So a volt/ammeter has a dial, a clock has a dial etc.

I suppose I could see myself calling the temperature setting of a cooker the "Temperature dial", but not the mode selector knob thing. Mode/Temperature selector is quite a good one actually. Still doesn't come to hand like knob does though.

I take it you're being sarcastic.

Perhaps my English is letting me down, but besides clothing buttons (and also the US word for what British English calls a "badge") I've never heard "button" used for anything that you can't communicate with by pushing it.

I guess you could communicate with me by pushing my bellybutton, but I wouldn't be 100% sure what you were trying to say.

:) However, would you call your bellybutton a "button"? I think it's a compound noun where "button" can't stand on its own in a meaningful way.

That's the most mean comment I've seen in this thread. Bellybutton:Button::Button:{Butt/On}

What's the nubbin on the end of a fencing foil called?

Spherical mushrooms are buttons. So is the round thing on the poker table that shows who the current dealer is.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/button

Indeed. I changed the buttons on my car just last week. They were getting flat.

Sounds like a pain, especially if you have locking lug buttons.

Just look forward to ordering a big button afterwards, from Dominos.

Downvoted because you have no actual opinion on the article's content so you pick on a trivial side issue and raise its importance disproportionately.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law_of_trivialit...

Perhaps this person's opinion is "I expected this article's content to be about a button you can press to have some effect on traffic patterns, and instead the article was about a neat tactile feedback device used for accessibility. This article doesn't match my expectations."

Perhaps the downvotes will encourage this person to be more eloquent when stating their opinions in the future. Then again, perhaps it will just cause them to rage.

Curiously it is (so far) my highest voted comment in nearly two months, so I guess others had the same reaction I did.

Can't argue with results! I wonder if a more verbose comment saying essentially the same thing would have been upvoted as much.

Now it's my highest rated comment for two-and-a-half years. I'm not sure how to feel about that.

My highest rated comment (~50 upvotes) was a pun with no intellectual value. It's one of those things that makes you realize upvotes are meaningless; I now generally restrict my upvoting to behaviors I want to encourage and comments that I want higher exposure for (push them upwards).

Quite. I expected the "button" to have an effect on something. Instead I got "the little known twizzler that twizzles when it's time to cross", which is much less interesting.

From where I stand, the comment two levels up is more relevant to the article than the comment one level up...

Yes I think you and I have a different definition of a what a modern 'button' is than the BBC.

technically is is call a tactile rotating cone (or tactile for short).

Traffic Signal Engineer.....

I've always wondered why elevated pedestrian walkways aren't more common. Too expensive, no doubt, but the savings in travel time and lives from accidents seems worth it.

Two cases: Dense urban areas and sparse lightly-trafficked areas. In lightly-trafficked areas, you're absolutely right about the cost limitation.

In the dense urban case, where "elevated pedestrian walkway" means "getting people away from cars", it means decimating foot traffic to stores and restaurants, ceding the area to automobiles. Generally regarded as horrible for dense urban environments.You see this more in urban planning a few decades back, and it tended to not help the surrounding area. If you look at the places where people want to live and travel to, you don't see elevated walkways. So it's fallen out of favor, with more emphasis on getting speeding cars away from dense areas.

The exceptions are things like the NYC Skyline, which is basically a pedestrian freeway between and through areas already dominated by pedestrian foot traffic and relatively light and slow vehicular traffic.

You don't need the whole sidewalk elevated, just the crossings. Las Vegas is known for this. http://ywwg.com/images/photos/060426-0/P4261565%20crosswalk....

I was going to comment on elevated crossings and walking up stairs, but then I saw the picture and remembered there are no regular stairs in the US, :+).

Reminds me of a picture of a (rather short, ten foot) escalator going up to a gym.

It makes more sense in Vegas. You really don't want such a mass of drunk people walking up and down stairs all the time :)

If by Skyline you mean Highline, then IMO it's quite different. It's not a purpose-build walkway, it's a disused railway converted into what I'd rather describe as an extreme elongated park than anything particularly optimised for pedestrian traffic.

Yeah, meant to say "Highline". I believe traversing the NYC Skyline is reserved for Spider-Man.

Other exception: really cold cities.

See the Calgary +15: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%2B15

They get around the foot-traffic problem by basically bringing the commerce up as well- it's like a giant indoor mall on the second floor of interconnected buildings.

A few cities do have Skyways or Skywalks besides the NYC example you cited. Two good examples are Minneapolis and Des Moines. And you're right -- it does negatively impact the street level businesses. It's really more about climate control in those cities, however.

Skyways make winter bearable here. Also makes exercise safer because you don't have to worry about slipping on icy streets.

Tokyo has tons of elevated and undgerground pedestrian walkways, including in some of the most fashionable/popular/heavily-trafficked (by pedestrians) areas, e.g., around Shibuya station.

An interesting extreme case is the south-east side of Yokohama station, where they (stupidly) put in one the most insane messes of concentrated roadways I've ever seen [not just 8+ lane roads, but 4-5 vertical levels of roadways!]. The area also has extremely heavy pedestrian traffic, which essentially all happens underground or on elevated walkways; basically nobody walks at ground level any longer. This may sound horrible, but in fact it's pretty nice ... you really don't realize what a mess it is unless you look back from a distance.

In both cases, the retail has followed the pedestrians under or over the ground...

In part because people drop things from them onto the cars underneath. Recently a pedestrian overpass was removed from a street near where I live because of that. They replaced it, at great expense, with an underpass. Now that's been closed because people didn't like going through it at night, and it smelled really rank anyway.

Finally, we have a pedestrian crossing with lights. It's less safe for the people, and more inconvenient for the cars, and all because not everyone behaves nicely.

There have been numerous cases where heavy rocks and the like were tossed from pedestrian-accessible overpasses over highways. Not pleasant. Neither are underpasses, for some reason, unless well-lit and regularly maintained, they attract undesirables, vandalism, and trash. These can be mitigated by clever design though: clean, immaculate look, enough (pale/white) lighting, enough vertical space, plenty of traffic, and visibility.

When I was in Brisbane, most pedestrian crossings vibrated and made a distinctive sound -- a single "chirp" followed by quick beeps -- to indicate it was safe to cross.

In Boston, to disambiguate different nearby crossings, the walk signals may make different noises. It used to be a beep in one direction and a chirp in the other, but these days it could be a snare drum in one direction, and a cowbell in the other. (I guess some city planner had a fever for which there is only one prescription...?)

In Burnaby, BC we have some pedestrian signals that will audibly count down how long is left to cross the road as well as providing a visual counter on the signal itself.

Here in Kalamazoo, MI we don't have these... but all of our crosswalks beep and talk.

For example it will tell you "Water, Walk sign is on across water" and then count down when you get 15 seconds away from the point when you can no longer walk.

I do wish it would say "Walk on water like Jesus did"

We have a similar vibrating button in Germany that also indicates in which direction this light actually points with a tactile arrow.

Not only that, it also tells you if there is an "island" in the middle of the road where you should step over. The arrow has a bar through it (looks a bit like a cross sign)

We were told about them in school - I use them when looking at my phone with headphones in when walking around cities. Maybe telling people about them is now more relevant than it was when I was in school, for just this reason.

In San Francisco the button you press vibrates aggressive when it is time to cross. I just discovered this yesterday and thought it amazing. Consider my surprise to read this today!

Wait but isn't this the purpose of the chirping sound when the crossing signal comes on? Far more effective and serves more than one person. However I realize it may not work on people who are both blind and deaf.

As per the article, those are not installed at every intersection. In my experience, they're rare outside of large cities.

If there are two crossings next to each other where either can be on green while the other is red, the noise wont be there. It's to make sure that someone waiting at the red crossing does not hear the noise and cross. I think the article mentions that somewhere.

The intersection crossings in my hometown and in my current city all have noise. They just use different noises for the different directions. E.g., N-S crossings might chirp while E-W crossings might beep. (I don't remember exactly what the rule is, but I'm sure a blind person would.)

At my university, they'd make the chirping noise, but it'd also state which road has the walk sign. So it'd repeatedly say "Farm Lane Walk Sign" while the sign was on.

At many of the crossings in Ise, Japan there is a button to call for assistance crossing the road. Or give more time to cross for old people. Or something like that, which I didn't quite understand.

I remember going there with a friend who was absolutely furious with me for pressing the button, twice in fact. This was on one of the most sacred days of the year to visit Ise, one of the most sacred places in Japan, and it punctuated a long string of hilarious/egregiously-insensitive etiquette blunders I had made throughout the day.

In Sweden the traffic lights make different ticking sounds depending on what state they are in. The traffic lights have three states: red, green and blinking green which means that it'll soon turn red again. Super handy for us seeing too since you don't have to watch the light to know when it's changed.

There's a sound clip on Wikipedia in which you can hear two of the states: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a0/LA2_dont_...

Here in Bellevue, WA they have an interesting (not to say obvious) solution to having a sound play when there are pedestrian crossings in both directions. The north-south ones play a sound, while the east-west ones play a different sound. As far as I've observed, that's consistent throughout the city. Some crossings don't have sound, though. I'll check if they have the cone thing.

In The Netherlands we have a ticking sound in the pole called "rateltikkers" (rattle ticker). When red the tick is about once per second. When green it is ticking very fast.

As kids we used to believe that if you manually turned the knob, it would force the lights to go green.

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