I work for a Danish muniplacity and I can assure you that every side way button has a functional purpose. It’s just that it’s not always the same one, and it va

I work for a Danish muniplacity and I can assure you that every side way button has a functional purpose. It’s just that it’s not always the same one, and it varies throughout the day. Some of the buttons are there solely for the visually impaired. Some of these will always play a beeping sound and then play it louder when you press them, others will only play the beeping sound if you press them. These buttons are generally placed in cities or at busy cross roads wherethere is never no-traffic sounds. Others tell the signals you want to cross. In some cases, the pedestrian lights will never turn green unless you press the button, this is typically in the suburbs or in the country on streeets that are busy in one direction. Others will shorten the traffic cycle of the lights. Here’s the thing though, most traffic lights are guided by data science to make traffic flow optimal. So often the pedestrian button is turned off during rush hours, where the signal is operating to maximize flow. Then during off hours, one direction may get prioritized because it has more traffic, and then the pedestrian button in the other direction gets turned on to shorten the cycle. Sometimes that setup alters multiple times during a day. Many of the buttons combine functionality. Aside from that they sometime get turned off for maintenance, maybe the button broke, maybe the traffic light got updated and the button needs to get changed. Maybe we’re testing a new traffic flow. Since 90% of them aren’t high priority, they can be turned off for quite a while, waiting to get fixed/updated. Hell, even the ones that are required for green lights aren’t necessarily fixed the same day, because the other 3 directions still work (we do fix these within a week though). Finally there are the decommissioned buttons. As you might imagine they can be there for quite some time. It’s ridiculously expensive to remove buttons from just one cross section, so we pool them together. Of course this means that they can sit there for years waiting to be removed. So it’s confusing. I know how they work, and I’ll still press the ones that are only there to give off sound. None of them are installed for the reasons stated in the article though. In sidewalks where people have trouble waiting, we install visible timers that tell you exactly when it’ll be green instead.