Don't even get me started on crosswalks but I guess I'll get started on crosswalks.
1) People who press the button over and over and over and over and keep pressing it until the light changes and they think to themselves "YES! I was trying to make it think there's 100 people here all wanting to cross so it had better hurry up and change and it worked!"
This is toddler-level thinking but somehow it survives education into adulthood that somehow you're fooling the signal when the reality is that ONE SINGLE PRESS tells it that there's someone wanting to cross and it'll activate the WALK sign at the next change or, in the case of flashing-light crosswalks, pretty much instantly.
2) Most of the intersections in my city have pedestrian-activated buttons... BUT THEY DON'T DO SHIT.
I'll be driving to work at 6am, nobody around, and I'll approach an intersection, I have the green light, there's NOBODY crossing my path, and THE LIGHT STOPS ME FOR NO REASON just so that NOBODY WILL CROSS IN FRONT OF ME. So I sit there for 45-60s doing nothing waiting for nothing. So on my drive to work I go through about 20 intersections and I'm guaranteed to be stopped at half of them for no reason.
The worst part is that the PEDESTRIAN "WALK" SIGNAL ALSO ACTIVATES even thought there's NO PEDESTRIANS THERE and NOBODY PRESSED THE FRIGGIN' BUTTON. So why the frack is it changing at all?
If the WALK light activates anyway then why even have a pedestrian button at all? In the downtown core where there's constant foot traffic then it makes sense to just always have the walk lights activate but it shouldn't be happening anywhere else.
3) Pedestrian buttons that don't do anything. One example is that there's 3 crosswalks in front of my hospital, all with buttons, but pushing them does nothing. It doesn't speed anything up, and it doesn't tell it to activate the WALK light, it just does it every time at a set interval. Again, it's 6am, there's NOBODY around, and these lights just change at their set time and activate the WALK light for no reason so I'm sitting there for 45-60s doing nothing.
So why install pedestrian-activated controls if they don't do anything? Why install those in-ground car detectors that let the red light know someone is waiting if the light just changes anyway regardless?
I tried contacting my city about it and they said that sometimes they malfunction, which is fine, but this isn't a malfunction at all, they've actually been set up this way. You want to keep traffic flowing? Here's a major problem that seemingly would be easy to fix.
PS - My wife will walk all the way down the block to a crosswalk instead of jaywalk over an empty street.