You're late, the light is red, and your thumb is already on the crosswalk button before your brain catches up. You may think if you press again, harder, maybe an extra force will convince the signal to change faster. It won't, and according to a 2004 New York Times investigation, it hasn't for a very long time. Reporter Michael Luo found that more than 2,500 of the roughly 3,250 pedestrian buttons still standing across New York City had been quietly turned off years previously, after computer- controlled traffic came to manage intersections. The buttons remained bolted on their posts. The signs above them, "To Cross Street, Push Button, Wait for Walk Signal," likewise stayed up, unnoticed by the thousands of people who used them.
The picture hasn't improved much since. A 2018 CNN report, citing a New York City Department of Transportation spokesperson, put the number of working buttons at only about 100 out of the roughly 1,000 still in the ground, and that figure is the most recent one the city has confirmed publicly; nobody has put out an updated count since. The city's own transportation department has separately described the scale of the problem in intersections rather than individual buttons, estimating that around 1,000 intersections citywide have these decommissioned buttons: numbers that line up because most affected corners have just one button assembly apiece.
