Do crosswalk buttons do anything?

When you press a button on a crosswalk signal, does the light actually change any faster than it would otherwise? Recently, the Boston Globe reported that, at least in downtown Boston, those buttons are nothing more than placebos. The city, the article said, simply cannot allow a single person to manipulate the traffic cycle. The buttons for pedestrians don’t do anything.

In Houston, those buttons appear to actually do something. At least, they do when they’re working.

Geoff Carleton, a principal at Traffic Engineers, said that as far as he knows, there aren’t any placebo buttons in Houston. “However, we do have ones that don’t work, that are broken,” he said.

For the most part, Carleton said, the crosswalk lights with push buttons are located in places where they’re needed.

When you push a crosswalk button, he explains, it lets the signal operations know that someone is planning to cross the street, so the light adjusts, giving the pedestrian enough time to get across. So if you don’t push the button and just wait, you run the risk of not having enough time to cross the street.

“In places like downtown, where you have signals that don’t have push buttons, they automatically just come up as walk signals,” Carleton said. In those pedestrian-heavy places, the lights always allow enough time for a person to cross.

In essence, he said, the push buttons are there to make things more efficient — for cars. But a great question to ask, Carleton said, is whether we need the buttons at all. In places that are trying to promote increased walkability, pedestrian buttons could decrease the flow of traffic, he said.

Boston and Houston are on opposite sides of the spectrum when it comes to walkability. Boston is much denser than Houston, a city known for its sprawl, and increased density makes higher pedestrian traffic flow much easier to achieve in a general context.

“If you compare Boston to the central core of Houston, I think we’re in a position where we can start being more aggressive about promoting walkability in places where destinations are close enough to each other to walk,” Carleton said.

Glissette Santana is a freelance writer for Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research. This story originally appeared on the Kinder Institute’s blog, The Urban Edge.