The Many Styles of "Walk"

Here is a set of symbols that we pass all the time, but probably never pay attention to: walk signals at intersections.  I have a good idea in my mind of what they should look like, but I'm sure there is a whole history of designs and testing.

This feels like the basic pattern to me, growing up in the 70s and 80s.

But we recently saw one of these newer ones that lays out all the rules.

I'm not sure how many people are actually helped by that, who have never seen one before and are willing to read all the rules to see if the button still does what they expect it to.  There are very few pedestrians out on sidewalks in our town these days.

Aside from the visible sign, I know of a few intersections in town (Escondido, CA) which have a stereo "chirp" sound that would help blind pedestrians know which direction to walk in.  We have some that have voices saying exactly which of the roads it's safe to cross, as in, "You may now cross Broadway." 

Over in the beach cities, the foot traffic is much higher. Here is one we found in Encinitas which thanks the donors who helped fund the acoustics:

 
Some crosswalks just say Walk and Don't Walk.  Some have a countdown in seconds.  This may blow your mind, but here is a diagonal crosswalk in Encinitas, CA where they actually block all 4 directions of car traffic for those 30 seconds while people get across:

It's actually surprising how many different styles of crosswalk signals there are in our one medium-sized (population 200,000) town.  I suppose it depends on what year each signal was installed.  There's no way a city can afford to replace every signal each time a new design comes out.  I would guess that our town has 1000 traffic signals and 5000 crosswalks, and they probably cost $100K to install at today's prices.

Whenever I do come up to one of these buttons, I get the feeling that they're not even connected to anything.  It's not like I push the button and the traffic light turns red right away.  The timing feels exactly the same as if I had not pushed a button at all.  On the other hand, I'm sure I have gone through intersections where the empty crosswalks are NOT signalling to the non-existent walkers.  So even the wiring and logic must change from place to place and year to year.  There is a lot to think about while waiting for that signal ...

I will try to find other designs and post them here.

Mar 4: Down in Del Mar, these buttons will turn on bright blinking signals on nice wide crosswalks, and cars will screech to a halt like they've never thought about stopping for a pedestrian before ...