16 ms·

Why the world is full of buttons that don't work

59 points by electic 8y ago

blackbrokkoli 8y ago
That is one long non-article. Let's try: It's an aplication of the placebo effect. It gives people the feeling of having an impact on critical systems which work better automated when they have not, like on traffic lights. A net-positive effect is widely observed.
- UweSchmidt 8y ago
  Can't agree that the effect is net positive. It adds another level of confusion and doubt in technology, since occasionally people will figure out what's going on or read articles like this one. How about showing a timer on the traffic light when they will turn green, or temporarily disable traffic lights when there is little traffic (using live data).
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    "How about showing a timer on the traffic light when they will turn green" In some areas they have these and it's really nice.
    - craftyguy 8y ago
      Yea having been to cities where this is deployed widely (e.g. Taipei), it's a shame that they aren't in use everywhere.
    - fjsolwmv 8y ago
      Those have negative consequences like car drivers accelerating other race against the upcoming red light.
- qubax 8y ago
  > That is one long non-article. CNN...
wodenokoto 8y ago
Is this an American phenomenon[1]? If I forget to click the pedestrian button, cars in the same direction as me will get green light, while I wait for red. Most elevators don't have a close button in Denmark. But it definitely worked in Japan. I can't remember ever sitting in an office with a temperature control knob available. [1] ... or am I just fooling myself on these accounts?
- Macha 8y ago
  Yeah, the pedestrian section is clearly an optional part of the cycle at most traffic lights I interact with (Dublin). If no button is pressed, then some other part of the cycle is extended and the pedestrian light is skipped. This isn't the same as pressing the button indicating that traffic will be stopped in 20s or similar, but I don't know of anywhere traffic lights ever worked like that. You're still going to have to wait for the allocated "pedestrian" time, but it will never come without a button press
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - dmurray 8y ago
    Agreed. All traffic light buttons do something in Dublin, as far as I can tell. Most lights are at junctions. If you don't press the button there, there will be no point in the cycle where you're guaranteed no cars will cross your path. If you do, there will. Some traffic lights are just for pedestrians crossing, away from a junction. Normally those work pretty quickly - traffic stops in 10 seconds, so long as the last stop was at least 30 seconds ago. In some countries, pedestrians can get a green light while cars are still allowed turn across them. I'm not sure if that's the case in New York, but it might explain some of the confusion.
  - toast0 8y ago
    At some low traffic crossings, the lights are programmed to tend to be green in the more trafficed direction, but will start to change immediately if there is an indication of demand in the other direction -- through a pedestrian button on a detector loop in the road surface. When there's higher traffic, they do more of the traditional cadence, but pressing the pedestrian button ensures the cycle will be long enough to cross the street.
gumby 8y ago
warning: Safari "reader" mode can't fix that page, so you get little dribbles of text separated by pictures that don't add to a pretty minimal "story" (TLDR: various buttons are placebo in the US. Some, like elevator "door close" buttons, for ADA reasons -- they're really there for emergency personnel anyway, and some just as placebo, like some crossing signal buttons).
dagenix 8y ago
The fake thermostat is the most frustrating example and tends to make me angrier than anything else. The problem is, fake thermostats tend to tell you what the temperature is. And no matter what you set them to, which has no effect, they continue to mock your failed attempts to become comfortable by continueing tell you just how very cold you are. And nothing is more upsetting than turning up the heat, only to see the actual temperature continue to drop.
- ljm 8y ago
  I'm not sure I understand the logic of that when it's a hotel room, but in an office environment it's fair enough. As long as the maintained temperature sticks to what we understand as a typical room temp (21-23°C). What makes me think that is the attitude to weather in the UK, where the polarity shifts as soon as summer transitions to winter and vice versa. As in, thermostats in most UK shops and pubs and bars in the summer are set to levels of cold you would only begin to experience as November approaches; they're practically icy and an amazing example of desert conditions when night falls. But then winter approaches and everything is fired up to the point where you're practically sweating if you're wearing full on winter wear. The total lack of humidity prevents the sweating but the heat goes beyond cosy. I hate this, so my idea of getting a comfortable temperature doesn't align with the normal situation. But if I was to change it to suit my needs then that would have a negative affect on everybody who justified the need to freeze their ass off every time they walk into a shop when the sun takes its hat off. So when it comes to local climate control, it's practically impossible to please anybody. You can't give one person the power satisfy their taste at the expense of everybody else, that's why air conditioning fucking sucks. The best you can do is maintain a comfortable average, remove or restrict the thermostats, and provide other solutions that allow comfort without changing it for all.
  - dagenix 8y ago
    Oh yeah, the thermostats in offices totally shouldn't work - that would be maddening as everyone fought over temperature. I'd just rather have nothing at all than something which both pretends to do something while also making it very clear - via the temperature display - that it does nothing. At least at a crosswalk or in an elevator, I can pretend that what I'm doing has an effect.
Scoundreller 8y ago
I’ve found an ice/hot pack around the thermostat, packaged with a bubble envelope, quite effective at controlling temperatures to my wishes.
ljm 8y ago
> These features, such as tactile paving and audible traffic signals, help people with visual impairments cross the road and are only activated when the button is pressed. Unless I'm living in a different version of London to the authors, it is unfortunately not the case that pressing the button invokes an interstitial foot massage.
- anticensor 8y ago
  You placed your feet wrong.
asaph 8y ago
I challenge the notion that there can be any net-positive effect from deliberately misleading the public and insulting people's intelligence. As word spreads that people are being actively deceived, overall trust in the system is eroded. These placebo buttons are a fraud and should be removed.
- kpil 8y ago
  I agree, but I will settle for a sticker that says "disabled." Also, when I press a "close door" button in an elevator, I expect a so-fast-it's'-silly Star Wars closing speed. Or realistically at least a reaction within 0.5 seconds or I get instantly annoyed.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
tialaramex 8y ago
There are three crossings near me that exhibit some different behaviours you'll see in the UK 1. There's a major crossroads (junction of a bypass). The natural phase design means that vehicles will be stopped before each crossing in the phase anyway. So the buttons _almost_ do nothing. Why "almost" ? Well, in the middle of the night with almost no traffic, the phases stop being automatic, bypass traffic gets a green all the time. If something comes on the side road, the phases will happen, but you don't want to wait for that as a pedestrian, your buttons will cause all the phases (even the ones you don't care about for crossing motor traffic) to happen so that you can cross. In practice of course at this hour few pedestrians push the buttons anyway, they can see there's no traffic. 2. The high street nearby has an old-fashioned Pelican crossing, and the buttons work as expected. A Pelican is a familiar design, traffic lights control the motor traffic and red/green lamps are attached for pedestrians, facing them from the far side of the road, the pedestrian presses the button, a timer starts, and after some configured delay the traffic signals bring motor traffic to a halt, then you can cross. 3. But it also has a newer Puffin crossing. The Puffin crossing is superficially similar to a Pelican, and road vehicle operators need no extra training, but for a pedestrian the operation is improved in one immediately visible and one invisible way: Visibly the red/ green lamps are moved to the pedestrian's side of the road, positioned so that when looking at them the pedestrian can also see the road with oncoming traffic (in the UK this will usually be to their right, but in some cases it's the left and the Puffin is adjusted appropriately). This reduces the hazard of pedestrians stepping in front of traffic when they have a green light but a motorist hasn't slowed. Also, the timer now starts when the crossing is used, and inhibits further crossing activations. For a busy crossing this makes no difference, but at a quiet crossing it means if you arrive after a long lull it will activate immediately, since the traffic has not recently been interrupted. A big improvement. Elsewhere in my city I've also noticed examples of the Pegasus and Toucan, which are similar to the Puffin except that they're intended to also accommodate horses (Pegasus) and bicycles (Toucan) where routes allow these in addition to pedestrians.
- sigwinch28 8y ago
  The most notable difference between Pelican and Puffin crossings is the phases. Pelican crossings go through a flashing amber phase on their way from red to green, imitating the behaviour of Belisha beacons from Zebra crossings. Puffin crossings remove this behaviour, instead opting for the typical red -> red+amber -> green phase, using pedestrian sensors instead of solely a timer. This also means that the system can cancel the crossing sequence if the pedestrian pushes the wait button, but then leaves.
a-dub 8y ago
I don't buy this argument that they were explicitly installed as a placebo. Instead I think they're basically a form of technical debt. In the elevators, they probably once did work, but then the ADA stuff came about or the maintenance people just didn't see the point of hooking them up. For crossings, some of them do work, and perhaps many. What's easiest, roll them out uniformly or install a hodge podge? ...and for the motels, it wouldn't surprise me one bit if it's cheaper to buy a residential thermostat with a knob than a commercial temperature sensor. Maybe that even worked as well... Engineers and builders don't care about "placebo effects on users" except for in the most carefully built UX scenarios. We're talking about basic infrastructure here, no one really cares about UX that much as long as it meets basic requirements. All these buttons exist as an accident, or they're detritus from an era when they did work, or it was just cheaper to get the panel with a button than a blank. "Let's put a placebo button in to make people feel better." said no traffic engineer, elevator installer, motel HVAC installer, ever.
- hartator 8y ago
  I agree. Definitely more a "Heinlein's Razor" variation on "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity".
  - SahAssar 8y ago
    *Hanlon's razor
    - jwilk 8y ago
      Both names are in use. From The Jargon File (http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/Hanlons-Razor.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/Hanlons-Razor.html): At http://www.statusq.org/2001/11/26.html http://www.statusq.org/2001/11/26.html it is claimed that Hanlon's Razor was coined by one Robert J. Hanlon of Scranton, PA. However, a curiously similar remark (“You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity.”) appears in Logic of Empire, a classic 1941 SF story by Robert A. Heinlein […].
Havoc 8y ago
>As for the lights, a growing number of them are now integrated into an electronic system that detects traffic and adjusts intervals accordingly (giving priority to buses if they're running late, for example), which means that pressing the button has no effect. Surely pedestrian presses button is a valuable input to any such semi-smart traffic management system? If the system is smart enough to know about late buses and their routes then this very binary input should be easy to integrate...
- dredds 8y ago
  Thou if the buttons were used for pedestrian management (stats) then a certain group of people would still 'hammer' them like on old arcade machines just for the heck of it. (note the high-stress people that repeatedly smash these buttons that never work)
donatj 8y ago
What's more frustrating is the lights in my town literally won't give you walk, ever, unless you push the button. So some do nothing, and some are required. That makes all required, and that is frustrating.
meesterdude 8y ago
The same is unfortunately quite true of the web.
droithomme 8y ago
These buttons aren't really non-functional. They work to spread disease.
nmstoker 8y ago
In the UK, the majority I run into seem to be near-placebo, but they do actually work in particular scenarios, it's just influenced by an algorithm. The key one is Tube train buttons. For indoor stations, they are effectively placebo buttons, but once the weather gets very hot or cold and the Tube train is outdoors, they tend to become active. By the inconsistent way they're activated, I believe it's the train driver in control but that may be different on different lines. The part that interests me is just how many people fail to notice they have no effect indoors - whilst it's potentially difficult to spot with an isolated button (eg at a road crossing), it's blatant for the Tube as everyone's door opens at the same time and everyone emerges at basically the same time just after (with tiny variations). What stitches to tourists in London, is that it's the other way on UK railway trains (near London at least) - they usually do work always, and thus the inconsistency provides a further barrier to figuring it out!
- im3w1l 8y ago
  I like the way the Swedish subway system works. Door buttons are normally inactive, but when they are active they are lit up.
  - nmstoker 8y ago
    Yes, that's ideal
njarboe 8y ago
I would love for the elevator door close to work for me, but I thought they still existed for operation during a fire. You can see a key where the firemen can override the system and keep doors open or shut as long as they want. Here is one site[1] that seems to verify that the close door button is used during emergency operation. [1]https://www.wikihow.com/Operate-an-Elevator-in-Fire-Service-Mode https://www.wikihow.com/Operate-an-Elevator-in-Fire-Service-...
carc1n0gen 8y ago
In the city I live in, the crosswalk buttons are not for making the lights change, but to tell the crosswalk to play an auditory signal the next time it changes. This is of course for the visually impaired.
mjevans 8y ago
Actually I believe they often DO work in service elevators and other 'back of house' situations. In a normal elevator I imagine they also do work when in a privileged mode (such as an EMS key override).
neumann 8y ago
My favourite button that doesn't work is The DFA fader [0]. Basically, a tool of the audio engineer to give difficult clients an auditory placebo effect when they want to 'get it just right'. There is even a paper on its effect [1]. There was the story of a famous record (I can't recall which) where after endless battles in the studio the audio engineer let the artist twiddle an unconnected dial so they felt they tweaked it just right. Maybe using a Rane PI 14 [2]. [0] https://intelligentsoundengineering.wordpress.com/2017/08/15/what-the-f-are-dfa-faders/ https://intelligentsoundengineering.wordpress.com/2017/08/15... [1] http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=18711 http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=18711 [2] http://www.rane.com/pi14.html http://www.rane.com/pi14.html
paulsutter 8y ago
In Japan, elevator close buttons not only work they are used everyday all the time. The doors are set to close with a long delay, so everyone habitually closes the door manually. Now that I’m back, I notice that elevators in the US often close immediately upon pressing a floor button. But also, most elevator close buttons do actually work.
rosege 8y ago
A local Sydney paper just did an article on how the pedestrian buttons in the city dont actually do anything during the day because they are on preset timers https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/when-pushing-the-pedestrian-button-works-and-when-it-doesn-t-20180820-p4zykp.html https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/when-pushing-the-pedestr...
- coatmatter 8y ago
  > "Pedestrian council chairman Harold Scruby"... Any time this so-called "Pedestrian Council of Australia chairman" (Harold Scruby) is covered by an Australian reporter, doubt should be heavily cast on the validity of the entire article or reporter's credibility. Look up who Harold Scruby really is. I'll say no more.
kbart 8y ago
Why this myth 'elevator close door button does not work' keeps reapearing every now and then? It's not universal - in some places it works, in some it doesn't. Why the obsesion to find a single 'truth', is so hard to accept that it's not the same everywhere? Same goes for pedestrian crossing button - I've missed quite few green/red traffic light iterations on my way to work, because I forgot to press a button and had to wait for another round.
- coatmatter 8y ago
  It's a creative writing problem. It's fine when creative writing is writing for writing's sake, but when dubious facts and over-generalisations are mixed in, myths start to develop. It reminds me just a tiny bit of the "carrots are good for night vision" myth.
spicyusername 8y ago
"World full of buttons"... Describes only three buttons.

59 points by electic 8y ago

That is one long non-article. Let's try: It's an aplication of the placebo effect. It gives people the feeling of having an impact on critical systems which work better automated when they have not, like on traffic lights. A net-positive effect is widely observed.

UweSchmidt 8y ago
Can't agree that the effect is net positive. It adds another level of confusion and doubt in technology, since occasionally people will figure out what's going on or read articles like this one. How about showing a timer on the traffic light when they will turn green, or temporarily disable traffic lights when there is little traffic (using live data).
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  "How about showing a timer on the traffic light when they will turn green" In some areas they have these and it's really nice.
  - craftyguy 8y ago
    Yea having been to cities where this is deployed widely (e.g. Taipei), it's a shame that they aren't in use everywhere.
  - fjsolwmv 8y ago
    Those have negative consequences like car drivers accelerating other race against the upcoming red light.
qubax 8y ago
> That is one long non-article. CNN...

wodenokoto 8y ago

Is this an American phenomenon[1]? If I forget to click the pedestrian button, cars in the same direction as me will get green light, while I wait for red. Most elevators don't have a close button in Denmark. But it definitely worked in Japan. I can't remember ever sitting in an office with a temperature control knob available. [1] ... or am I just fooling myself on these accounts?

Macha 8y ago
Yeah, the pedestrian section is clearly an optional part of the cycle at most traffic lights I interact with (Dublin). If no button is pressed, then some other part of the cycle is extended and the pedestrian light is skipped. This isn't the same as pressing the button indicating that traffic will be stopped in 20s or similar, but I don't know of anywhere traffic lights ever worked like that. You're still going to have to wait for the allocated "pedestrian" time, but it will never come without a button press
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- dmurray 8y ago
  Agreed. All traffic light buttons do something in Dublin, as far as I can tell. Most lights are at junctions. If you don't press the button there, there will be no point in the cycle where you're guaranteed no cars will cross your path. If you do, there will. Some traffic lights are just for pedestrians crossing, away from a junction. Normally those work pretty quickly - traffic stops in 10 seconds, so long as the last stop was at least 30 seconds ago. In some countries, pedestrians can get a green light while cars are still allowed turn across them. I'm not sure if that's the case in New York, but it might explain some of the confusion.
- toast0 8y ago
  At some low traffic crossings, the lights are programmed to tend to be green in the more trafficed direction, but will start to change immediately if there is an indication of demand in the other direction -- through a pedestrian button on a detector loop in the road surface. When there's higher traffic, they do more of the traditional cadence, but pressing the pedestrian button ensures the cycle will be long enough to cross the street.

gumby 8y ago

warning: Safari "reader" mode can't fix that page, so you get little dribbles of text separated by pictures that don't add to a pretty minimal "story" (TLDR: various buttons are placebo in the US. Some, like elevator "door close" buttons, for ADA reasons -- they're really there for emergency personnel anyway, and some just as placebo, like some crossing signal buttons).

dagenix 8y ago

The fake thermostat is the most frustrating example and tends to make me angrier than anything else. The problem is, fake thermostats tend to tell you what the temperature is. And no matter what you set them to, which has no effect, they continue to mock your failed attempts to become comfortable by continueing tell you just how very cold you are. And nothing is more upsetting than turning up the heat, only to see the actual temperature continue to drop.

ljm 8y ago
I'm not sure I understand the logic of that when it's a hotel room, but in an office environment it's fair enough. As long as the maintained temperature sticks to what we understand as a typical room temp (21-23°C). What makes me think that is the attitude to weather in the UK, where the polarity shifts as soon as summer transitions to winter and vice versa. As in, thermostats in most UK shops and pubs and bars in the summer are set to levels of cold you would only begin to experience as November approaches; they're practically icy and an amazing example of desert conditions when night falls. But then winter approaches and everything is fired up to the point where you're practically sweating if you're wearing full on winter wear. The total lack of humidity prevents the sweating but the heat goes beyond cosy. I hate this, so my idea of getting a comfortable temperature doesn't align with the normal situation. But if I was to change it to suit my needs then that would have a negative affect on everybody who justified the need to freeze their ass off every time they walk into a shop when the sun takes its hat off. So when it comes to local climate control, it's practically impossible to please anybody. You can't give one person the power satisfy their taste at the expense of everybody else, that's why air conditioning fucking sucks. The best you can do is maintain a comfortable average, remove or restrict the thermostats, and provide other solutions that allow comfort without changing it for all.
- dagenix 8y ago
  Oh yeah, the thermostats in offices totally shouldn't work - that would be maddening as everyone fought over temperature. I'd just rather have nothing at all than something which both pretends to do something while also making it very clear - via the temperature display - that it does nothing. At least at a crosswalk or in an elevator, I can pretend that what I'm doing has an effect.

Scoundreller 8y ago

I’ve found an ice/hot pack around the thermostat, packaged with a bubble envelope, quite effective at controlling temperatures to my wishes.

ljm 8y ago

> These features, such as tactile paving and audible traffic signals, help people with visual impairments cross the road and are only activated when the button is pressed. Unless I'm living in a different version of London to the authors, it is unfortunately not the case that pressing the button invokes an interstitial foot massage.

anticensor 8y ago
You placed your feet wrong.

asaph 8y ago

I challenge the notion that there can be any net-positive effect from deliberately misleading the public and insulting people's intelligence. As word spreads that people are being actively deceived, overall trust in the system is eroded. These placebo buttons are a fraud and should be removed.

kpil 8y ago
I agree, but I will settle for a sticker that says "disabled." Also, when I press a "close door" button in an elevator, I expect a so-fast-it's'-silly Star Wars closing speed. Or realistically at least a reaction within 0.5 seconds or I get instantly annoyed.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

tialaramex 8y ago

There are three crossings near me that exhibit some different behaviours you'll see in the UK 1. There's a major crossroads (junction of a bypass). The natural phase design means that vehicles will be stopped before each crossing in the phase anyway. So the buttons _almost_ do nothing. Why "almost" ? Well, in the middle of the night with almost no traffic, the phases stop being automatic, bypass traffic gets a green all the time. If something comes on the side road, the phases will happen, but you don't want to wait for that as a pedestrian, your buttons will cause all the phases (even the ones you don't care about for crossing motor traffic) to happen so that you can cross. In practice of course at this hour few pedestrians push the buttons anyway, they can see there's no traffic. 2. The high street nearby has an old-fashioned Pelican crossing, and the buttons work as expected. A Pelican is a familiar design, traffic lights control the motor traffic and red/green lamps are attached for pedestrians, facing them from the far side of the road, the pedestrian presses the button, a timer starts, and after some configured delay the traffic signals bring motor traffic to a halt, then you can cross. 3. But it also has a newer Puffin crossing. The Puffin crossing is superficially similar to a Pelican, and road vehicle operators need no extra training, but for a pedestrian the operation is improved in one immediately visible and one invisible way: Visibly the red/ green lamps are moved to the pedestrian's side of the road, positioned so that when looking at them the pedestrian can also see the road with oncoming traffic (in the UK this will usually be to their right, but in some cases it's the left and the Puffin is adjusted appropriately). This reduces the hazard of pedestrians stepping in front of traffic when they have a green light but a motorist hasn't slowed. Also, the timer now starts when the crossing is used, and inhibits further crossing activations. For a busy crossing this makes no difference, but at a quiet crossing it means if you arrive after a long lull it will activate immediately, since the traffic has not recently been interrupted. A big improvement. Elsewhere in my city I've also noticed examples of the Pegasus and Toucan, which are similar to the Puffin except that they're intended to also accommodate horses (Pegasus) and bicycles (Toucan) where routes allow these in addition to pedestrians.

sigwinch28 8y ago
The most notable difference between Pelican and Puffin crossings is the phases. Pelican crossings go through a flashing amber phase on their way from red to green, imitating the behaviour of Belisha beacons from Zebra crossings. Puffin crossings remove this behaviour, instead opting for the typical red -> red+amber -> green phase, using pedestrian sensors instead of solely a timer. This also means that the system can cancel the crossing sequence if the pedestrian pushes the wait button, but then leaves.

a-dub 8y ago

I don't buy this argument that they were explicitly installed as a placebo. Instead I think they're basically a form of technical debt. In the elevators, they probably once did work, but then the ADA stuff came about or the maintenance people just didn't see the point of hooking them up. For crossings, some of them do work, and perhaps many. What's easiest, roll them out uniformly or install a hodge podge? ...and for the motels, it wouldn't surprise me one bit if it's cheaper to buy a residential thermostat with a knob than a commercial temperature sensor. Maybe that even worked as well... Engineers and builders don't care about "placebo effects on users" except for in the most carefully built UX scenarios. We're talking about basic infrastructure here, no one really cares about UX that much as long as it meets basic requirements. All these buttons exist as an accident, or they're detritus from an era when they did work, or it was just cheaper to get the panel with a button than a blank. "Let's put a placebo button in to make people feel better." said no traffic engineer, elevator installer, motel HVAC installer, ever.

hartator 8y ago
I agree. Definitely more a "Heinlein's Razor" variation on "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity".
- SahAssar 8y ago
  *Hanlon's razor
  - jwilk 8y ago
    Both names are in use. From The Jargon File (http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/Hanlons-Razor.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/Hanlons-Razor.html): At http://www.statusq.org/2001/11/26.html http://www.statusq.org/2001/11/26.html it is claimed that Hanlon's Razor was coined by one Robert J. Hanlon of Scranton, PA. However, a curiously similar remark (“You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity.”) appears in Logic of Empire, a classic 1941 SF story by Robert A. Heinlein […].

Havoc 8y ago

>As for the lights, a growing number of them are now integrated into an electronic system that detects traffic and adjusts intervals accordingly (giving priority to buses if they're running late, for example), which means that pressing the button has no effect. Surely pedestrian presses button is a valuable input to any such semi-smart traffic management system? If the system is smart enough to know about late buses and their routes then this very binary input should be easy to integrate...

dredds 8y ago
Thou if the buttons were used for pedestrian management (stats) then a certain group of people would still 'hammer' them like on old arcade machines just for the heck of it. (note the high-stress people that repeatedly smash these buttons that never work)

donatj 8y ago

What's more frustrating is the lights in my town literally won't give you walk, ever, unless you push the button. So some do nothing, and some are required. That makes all required, and that is frustrating.

meesterdude 8y ago

The same is unfortunately quite true of the web.

droithomme 8y ago

These buttons aren't really non-functional. They work to spread disease.

nmstoker 8y ago

In the UK, the majority I run into seem to be near-placebo, but they do actually work in particular scenarios, it's just influenced by an algorithm. The key one is Tube train buttons. For indoor stations, they are effectively placebo buttons, but once the weather gets very hot or cold and the Tube train is outdoors, they tend to become active. By the inconsistent way they're activated, I believe it's the train driver in control but that may be different on different lines. The part that interests me is just how many people fail to notice they have no effect indoors - whilst it's potentially difficult to spot with an isolated button (eg at a road crossing), it's blatant for the Tube as everyone's door opens at the same time and everyone emerges at basically the same time just after (with tiny variations). What stitches to tourists in London, is that it's the other way on UK railway trains (near London at least) - they usually do work always, and thus the inconsistency provides a further barrier to figuring it out!

im3w1l 8y ago
I like the way the Swedish subway system works. Door buttons are normally inactive, but when they are active they are lit up.
- nmstoker 8y ago
  Yes, that's ideal

njarboe 8y ago

I would love for the elevator door close to work for me, but I thought they still existed for operation during a fire. You can see a key where the firemen can override the system and keep doors open or shut as long as they want. Here is one site[1] that seems to verify that the close door button is used during emergency operation. [1]https://www.wikihow.com/Operate-an-Elevator-in-Fire-Service-Mode https://www.wikihow.com/Operate-an-Elevator-in-Fire-Service-...

carc1n0gen 8y ago

In the city I live in, the crosswalk buttons are not for making the lights change, but to tell the crosswalk to play an auditory signal the next time it changes. This is of course for the visually impaired.

mjevans 8y ago

Actually I believe they often DO work in service elevators and other 'back of house' situations. In a normal elevator I imagine they also do work when in a privileged mode (such as an EMS key override).

neumann 8y ago

My favourite button that doesn't work is The DFA fader [0]. Basically, a tool of the audio engineer to give difficult clients an auditory placebo effect when they want to 'get it just right'. There is even a paper on its effect [1]. There was the story of a famous record (I can't recall which) where after endless battles in the studio the audio engineer let the artist twiddle an unconnected dial so they felt they tweaked it just right. Maybe using a Rane PI 14 [2]. [0] https://intelligentsoundengineering.wordpress.com/2017/08/15/what-the-f-are-dfa-faders/ https://intelligentsoundengineering.wordpress.com/2017/08/15... [1] http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=18711 http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=18711 [2] http://www.rane.com/pi14.html http://www.rane.com/pi14.html

paulsutter 8y ago

In Japan, elevator close buttons not only work they are used everyday all the time. The doors are set to close with a long delay, so everyone habitually closes the door manually. Now that I’m back, I notice that elevators in the US often close immediately upon pressing a floor button. But also, most elevator close buttons do actually work.

rosege 8y ago

A local Sydney paper just did an article on how the pedestrian buttons in the city dont actually do anything during the day because they are on preset timers https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/when-pushing-the-pedestrian-button-works-and-when-it-doesn-t-20180820-p4zykp.html https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/when-pushing-the-pedestr...

coatmatter 8y ago
> "Pedestrian council chairman Harold Scruby"... Any time this so-called "Pedestrian Council of Australia chairman" (Harold Scruby) is covered by an Australian reporter, doubt should be heavily cast on the validity of the entire article or reporter's credibility. Look up who Harold Scruby really is. I'll say no more.

kbart 8y ago

Why this myth 'elevator close door button does not work' keeps reapearing every now and then? It's not universal - in some places it works, in some it doesn't. Why the obsesion to find a single 'truth', is so hard to accept that it's not the same everywhere? Same goes for pedestrian crossing button - I've missed quite few green/red traffic light iterations on my way to work, because I forgot to press a button and had to wait for another round.

coatmatter 8y ago
It's a creative writing problem. It's fine when creative writing is writing for writing's sake, but when dubious facts and over-generalisations are mixed in, myths start to develop. It reminds me just a tiny bit of the "carrots are good for night vision" myth.

spicyusername 8y ago

"World full of buttons"... Describes only three buttons.