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?
What really sucks is when you’re in a left turn lane with a red arrow and the light changes for cars going straight but just keeps you with a red arrow. No button to press.Just gotta run the red cuz it’s never gonna change :(
Because oncoming traffic also has a green light? What are you doing running red lights? I have that exact setup near where I live. Straight gets green, left turn has a red arrow (meaning right of way when green), which cannot get green because oncoming straight traffic has green. Once those get red and it’s your turn in the cycle, it will go green. As long as there is any crossing traffic, you will not get green, that’s what the arrow means. Please don’t ever run a red light again, other people with an arrow probably have green and won’t expect you. If you don’t get green, check if you’ve stopped at the line, since a lot of traffic lights will skip empty lanes to improve the flow of traffic. No sense in giving an empty lane a green light whilst people in other lanes are waiting at a red light. Unfortunately I see people daily who stop well short of the line and thus aren’t picked up by the ground loops. Until people behind them honk when the light doesn’t turn green for two cycles and they pull up properly.
Oh, I hate running red lights, but the problem is some of these are designed to only trigger when a car is present. It doesn’t matter where you put your bicycle; it will not detect it.
I’ve sat at a red left-turn-arrow while the light changed for traffic going in other directions five times. If you don’t run the red, you’ll literally sit there forever because it will not change for you. It sucks, but this is an engineering problem.
Some countries are better at this than others. Some cities are better at this than others.
I always shake my head and cuss when I encounter something like this, because it absolutely should not exist.