In Stockholm, traffic lights have a push button that pedestrians are supposed to press when they cross and all the type A personalities that’d press the button even when it had already been pressed and lit up used to bug me, an annoyance that persisted in me for maybe six months or so after I found out that no, it doesn’t “reset” the pushing and we don’t have to wait longer. It’s just a redundant, safely idempotent extra press for no benefit or effect. It’s fine.
These days I have the opposite problem: people who don’t press at all, even when it’s unlit! Almost no-one seems to know that they need to actually press the traffic light button!
While a lot of this is due to people being distracted phone addicts and I’ve seen again and again someone arriving at a traffic light, not pressing the button but instead immediately whipping out their phone and then keeping it up from then on even as they absentmindedly cross the street.
But I have two other stories about this both from within the past three days and neither involved phones for the most part. First, there’s this one crossing where there’s roadwork being done so one side of the street have a metal bridge to safely walk on but they cannot reach the push button and I walked from that direction. I had no way to reach the button. On the other side of the street two women arrived; the one nearest the button had a dog in a leash and a paper tote but could reasonably easily have pushed the button. After a while even more people arrived (some of these latter arrivals were phone zombies, breaking the theme of this essay, which is about the more general trend of absentminded lack of awareness even when phones are away) and they weren’t carrying anything at all. I tried gesturing to them to push the button but they didn’t. They stood and waited for a while without pushing the button and after a while they just started crossing the street jaywalkingly, even though the light still said don’t walk. So I gave up and do the same. And of course Murphy being a 🐝, that’s when cars wanted to turn in on that there and almost hit us. Because of the construction the sidewalk was way closer to the cars than normal so using the traffic light was even more important than usual. I was so salty that they just didn’t press.
Later that same evening at another intersection on the same busy street two men in their fifties were walking ahead of me; along the same street as me just ahead so they arrived at the traffic lights first. They decided to just cross the street immediately without pushing no sissy “traffic light button” but after just a few step as cars roar by they reconsidered and stepped back. And they didn’t press the button. They just stood there until I caught up and could press the button. It eventually turned green and we all could cross. We could’ve crossed way sooner if they had just pressed the button and then it would’ve been green by the time I got there. Patience? Yeah, yeah… how long will that take?