I recently learned something fascinating.
Did you know that in many large, urban cities across the globe, the pedestrian crosswalk buttons are disconnected – and have been for decades?
As technology advanced, pedestrian phases were automated in many cities with dense populations, rendering the human interaction of a button pointless. Removing the buttons would have been a costly endeavor but there was another reason for keeping them. The buttons – even in their non-functioning state – served a bigger purpose…