In his old year cabaret show, Peter Pannekoek stated the buttons near crossings don’t actually do anything, they’re just there to just pacify people. I’m fairly certain they in fact do work, though for cyclists they’re mostly redundant: the magnetic loops in the road surface detect cyclists. Only for lightweight carbon bikes a manual button is still useful.
Am I correct in my assumption?
Peter doesn’t know what he’s talking about. There are many many low traffic intersections where the cyclist won’t get a green light without touching the button or getting detected by the ground loop. He probably lives in a city and only comes across busy intersections where the lights are simply running on a cycle because there is always somebody somewhere. And even then late in the evening those lights may switch to a low traffic mode where the way through gets green all the time and crossing traffic only gets green when they are detected or push the button.
I have a racing bike with carbon wheels and a mostly carbon frame, ground loops will not pick up my presence, so I’m thankful for the buttons. Modern traffic lights are way more complex then most people realize, often integrated with other lights to improve the flow of traffic, especially in big cities. Just because he doesn’t know how shit works, doesn’t mean it’s useless.
We should get a civil engineer in here to tell us about modern traffic lights, it’s actually very interesting.
would love a simplified version of the traffic lights, push and everything goes to green ;-) love the chaos