Press Button To Continue Being Ignored

I have developed a theory that many pedestrian crossing buttons are not actually connected to anything meaningful at all, beyond perhaps a small yellow light and the fading optimism of the British public.

Take the temporary roadworks crossings. You march up to them with purpose, jab the button and are rewarded instantly by a glowing WAIT sign, which I increasingly suspect is the electrical equivalent of a nurse saying, “The doctor will be with you shortly,” before disappearing for three hours.

The lights then continue exactly as they were going to anyway.

You stand there watching completely empty roads while nothing whatsoever happens. Then somebody else arrives and presses the button too, as though your earlier attempt perhaps lacked authority. Soon there are four of you taking turns to prod the thing like Victorian villagers attempting to contact the dead through a table in a village hall.

I joined in myself yesterday, despite already suspecting the whole apparatus was a fraud. That is how powerful the conditioning is. The button lights up, so you feel you have achieved something. British people are especially susceptible to this sort of thing because we were raised on queues, forms and implied authority. If a metal box on a pole tells us to WAIT, we obey automatically. Half the population would stand politely beside a sign saying “Press button to continue being ignored”.

What convinces me the whole thing is psychological is that nobody merely presses the button once. They hammer at it repeatedly with growing indignation, as though the crossing is a recalcitrant photocopier from 1987. You even see people arriving after the button has clearly already been pressed and immediately pressing it again, just to make certain the request has really gone through to Central Crossing Command.

In fairness, some crossings genuinely are demand-responsive, particularly late at night when pressing the button can produce an almost magical instant green man. Which only deepens the confusion because it keeps alive the national belief that all the others are also listening.

I suspect many temporary systems are simply running fixed timing sequences designed to optimise traffic flow while giving pedestrians the comforting illusion of participation. It is a bit like democracy, really. You are invited to press the button, your request is acknowledged with reassuring lights and noises, and then the system carries on doing exactly what it intended to do from the outset.

It is rather like those “close door” buttons in lifts which, according to persistent rumours, are often disconnected entirely. Millions of people solemnly pressing a button whose real function may simply be to occupy the human urge to interfere.

You see the same philosophy elsewhere. Self-service checkouts requiring staff authorisation to buy a cucumber. QR code menus in pubs that managed perfectly well with laminated paper for half a century. “Smart” motorways apparently making decisions by consulting damp tea leaves.

The pedestrian crossing button has clearly joined this great British tradition. A ceremonial interface. Something to keep the public occupied while the machinery gets on with its own priorities.

Still, we all keep pressing them.

Partly out of hope, partly superstition, and partly because if you do not press it, someone arriving thirty seconds later will immediately march up, stab the button theatrically with one finger, and look at you as though you are the sort of idiot who had been standing there all day without thinking of it.