{"id":694,"date":"2018-11-30T21:06:42","date_gmt":"2018-12-01T02:06:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/synetech.ddns.net\/blogs\/smarticles\/?p=694"},"modified":"2023-11-16T20:32:01","modified_gmt":"2023-11-17T01:32:01","slug":"wasting-tax-dollars-on-intersection-buttons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/synetech.ddns.net\/blogs\/smarticles\/2018\/11\/30\/wasting-tax-dollars-on-intersection-buttons\/","title":{"rendered":"Wasting Tax-Dollars on Beg-Buttons"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>At most intersections, you can usually find a pair of \u201cbeg-buttons\u201d for pedestrians to push to tell the traffic-control system that they are there and want to cross. There are usually separate buttons for each direction (one for crossing north-south and another for crossing east-west). This results in up to eight buttons at each intersection. However, this is wasteful over-engineering. In fact, with proper software design, only a single button is ever necessary at each corner of a standard 4-way intersection. Can you figure out the logic to prove this?<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"javascript:void(null);\" onclick=\"s_toggleDisplay(document.getElementById('SID17811908'), this, 'Show solution\u2026 &#9660;', '\u2026hide solution &#9650;');\">Show solution\u2026 &#9660;<\/a><\/p>\n<div id='SID17811908' style='display:none;'>\n<p>The traffic is always flowing in one of the two possible directions, either north-south, or east-west. Thus, there is no need for a pedestrian to push a button to cross in that direction. They only need to push the button if they want to cross in the orthogonal direction. Therefore, whenever the button is pressed, it should recognize that pedestrians want to cross in the opposite of the current direction of traffic flow.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<figure id=\"attachment_695\" class=\"thumbnail wp-caption alignleft\" style=\"width: 310px\"><a href=\"\/blogs\/smarticles\/files\/2018\/11\/Stop-Light-Button-Options.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/blogs\/smarticles\/files\/2018\/11\/Stop-Light-Button-Options-300x133.png\" alt=\"Intersection button design options\" width=\"300\" height=\"133\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-695\" srcset=\"https:\/\/synetech.ddns.net\/blogs\/smarticles\/files\/2018\/11\/Stop-Light-Button-Options-300x133.png 300w, https:\/\/synetech.ddns.net\/blogs\/smarticles\/files\/2018\/11\/Stop-Light-Button-Options-768x341.png 768w, https:\/\/synetech.ddns.net\/blogs\/smarticles\/files\/2018\/11\/Stop-Light-Button-Options.png 907w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><figcaption class=\"caption wp-caption-text\">Intersections can have either one or two crossing buttons at each corner<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At most intersections, you can usually find a pair of \u201cbeg-buttons\u201d for pedestrians to push to tell the traffic-control system that they are there and want to cross. There are usually separate buttons for each direction (one for crossing north-south and another for crossing east-west). This results in up to eight buttons at each intersection. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-694","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/synetech.ddns.net\/blogs\/smarticles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/694","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/synetech.ddns.net\/blogs\/smarticles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/synetech.ddns.net\/blogs\/smarticles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synetech.ddns.net\/blogs\/smarticles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synetech.ddns.net\/blogs\/smarticles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=694"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/synetech.ddns.net\/blogs\/smarticles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/694\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/synetech.ddns.net\/blogs\/smarticles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=694"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synetech.ddns.net\/blogs\/smarticles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=694"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synetech.ddns.net\/blogs\/smarticles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=694"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}