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(Or, "Things that annoy me, part #41")
Back in the olden days, someone had the bright idea of adding those little yellow "press to cross" boxes to pedestrian crossings at junctions. The idea being that unless someone actually wanted to cross the junction, traffic flow would not be needlessly impeded. (I'm not talking about the "stand alone" single-stop pedestrian crossing installations here, I'm specifically talking about the ones at junctions).
Then someone had the equally bright idea of switching off the logic for the have-any-pedestrians-pressed-the-button? part of the traffic manager's software as, after all, if it's a junction then there should always be a part where you can allow pedestrians to cross safely as part of the regular cycle. No point in modifying the cycle of lights as sooner or later a safe crossing window would naturally occur.
Then someone realised that you could increase the efficiency of traffic flow if you added a couple of filters and directed traffic in a much more granular way. Although when you did this, you lost the "safe" parts of a cycle where traffic was stopped to make way for pedestrians, so they switched the logic for the "press to cross" buttons back on again.
Unfortunately, this means that most people have now been trained to think it's not worth their while to press the button anymore. And they stand there, waiting for the lights to change, and end up running across the road during the "single amber light" part of the traffic light cycle whilst residual traffic buzzes past them from two directions. Especially dangerous when you consider that many drivers see an amber as a "speed up" rather than a "slow down" signal.
This really annoys me; there are some quite complicated arrangements of traffic lights I cross every day and as a result, I know their cycles extremely well. And I know that in order to cross safely YOU NEED TO PRESS THE BUTTON, or you can be marooned for what seems like an eternity as traffic whisks past you during the part where you would have been able to cross, if only the person standing there for the past five minutes had taken one second to PRESS THE DAMNED BUTTON.
Ninety seven times out of a hundred, I have to press it myself - regardless of the number of people in the crowd waiting to cross.
So: when you're next at a junction waiting to cross, and there's a small, forlorn yellow box with an unilluminated "WAIT" light... you know what to do, don't you?
PRESS THE DAMN BUTTON!