I feel I would never be able to cross the street
At the intersection, to cross the street, we usually press the pedestrian “WALK” buttons. When I just came to the U.S, I did not know this till a friend told me, “you need to press the button to cross the street”. Okay, since then, I always do it. However, do I really need to press those pedestrian “WALK” buttons at crosswalks? I feel like an idiot because they don’t seem to do anything.
What is happening?
Every time when I press the button, I might or might not hear “wait to cross xxx street”, and I might wait for a half minute or more than that. But I never get to know how long it will take. Then I did some research. Here is what I got.
Pushing the button doesn’t cause a “WALK” signal to appear immediately. The system still needs to complete its cycle and allow cars enough time to get through the intersection. That could take anywhere from five seconds to two minutes, depending on the signal settings and the traffic.
And if the pedestrian signals are in “recall” mode, pushing the button does nothing. In a recall system, pedestrian crossings are already built into the signal cycles, so a “WALK” will come up eventually, at some predetermined interval, whether you push the button or not.
How do I tell if this particular button is working?
I cannot. Only the city could tell whether a particular crossing is pushbutton-actuated, and they’d have to inspect the unit in order to tell whether it’s actually working properly.
How is it supposed to be?
Well, pedestrians always expect accurate feedback. It would be nice if we are able to know how long it will take exactly as we can always see the time counting while we cross the street. “Visibility of system status” is the first principle of Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design, this also applies to user experience design.
Even due to the technical difficulty that it is hard to tell pedestrians the exact waiting time, having an instruction telling the rationale of “walk” button would be helpful to let people know what is happening. Or when the anxious pedestrians lost their patience, more traffic troubles might happen.
