Many New York City crosswalk buttons no longer change the light; roughly 1,000 inactive buttons are still in place

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.

The city that did not address the issue


The obvious question is why New York didn't just remove the useless buttons. The answer, unglamorously, is money. Removing a single button means digging through wiring and pole infrastructure, which multiplied across a thousand-plus intersections, amounting to millions of dollars. That's also the likeliest explanation for why the button count itself has shrunk over the past two decades, from roughly 3,250 in 2004 down to around 1,000 today: the city never ran a dedicated removal program, but non-functional buttons have been quietly swapped out over the years as individual intersections went through unrelated capital projects, curb work, or signal upgrades. So the city kept a monument to outdated engineering standing on nearly every corner, and citizens continued to press buttons in good faith.

It's not a story about traffic engineering, but a story about what people want to believe about how much control they have. Psychologist Ellen Langer first described this pattern in a landmark 1975 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, coining the term "illusion of control" for people's tendency to overestimate their influence on outcomes actually governed by random chance, like betting on a coin toss simply because they flipped it themselves. Langer has since cited the button as an example of the illusion of control, saying that any action at all that makes one feel less like an observer has value, even if it changes nothing. Same with the "close door" button on elevators (many of which engineers have confirmed to be disconnected) or the desire to refresh an email inbox in the hope that doing so will prompt a new message to appear.

Not every button is a fake

The twist, few retellings of this story mention, is that not all New York buttons are fakes. A growing number are genuinely functional, and the city maintains that these real signals: the buttons, raised arrows, locator tones, and vibrating surfaces, exist for the benefit of pedestrians who are blind or have low vision, who use those cues to know when it's safe to cross.

According to a NYC Department of Transportation report, after a 2018 lawsuit, the city will be making thousands more accessible intersections over the course of the next decade. So a button you press today might genuinely be doing something, just not for you. At a working Accessible Pedestrian Signal, the walk phase still arrives on the same fixed schedule for everyone regardless of who presses the button; what your press actually triggers, at those particular locations, are the audible tones and vibrations that tell a blind or low-vision pedestrian it's their turn to cross. For a sighted pedestrian, then, pushing it changes nothing either way; it's simply doing real work for someone else.

Why should this matter

None of this affects how fast the light turns green, but it says something about the systems the young Americans interact with every day without questioning: interfaces that give an illusion of control while running on autopilot underneath. The crosswalk button isn't the only one. It's just one of the easiest to notice, and one of the hardest to fix without asking someone who knows whether it actually does anything. Which, in the end, is the most New York thing about it. A city too busy to stop the issue entirely or fix it properly, and honest enough with itself about that, eventually, when a reporter asked.