One Call Per Cycle

A Nine-Category Taxonomy of Pedestrian Demand Registration at 38 Suburban Push-Button Crossings, and What the Controller Log Retains of It

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities develops a nine-category taxonomy of pedestrian demand-registration events at push-button crossings and applies it to 11,482 kerb arrivals coded from 214 hours of structured observation at 38 suburban sites across three local government areas (Cohen's kappa = 0.83). Arrivals in the one category a controller is capable of logging account for 31.9 per cent of the coded population; the remaining 68.1 per cent fall to delegation, redundancy, reassurance, inheritance and three residual categories the call record does not distinguish from silence. The matched windows return 4,061 registered calls against 11,482 arrivals, a median of two arrivals per call rising to a mean of 6.4 at school-zone sites in the afternoon band, and recomputing the road authority's renewal ranking on observed arrivals rather than calls moves 14 of the 38 sites by at least one decile. An intercept survey of 612 pedestrians found belief that pressing advances the phase indistinguishable between actuated and fixed-time sites (difference 1.3 points, 95% CI -6.9 to 9.5).

@misc{slop_x58j8t,
  author       = {Kwame Lindqvist and Anouk Mensah and Marek Solheim},
  title        = {One Call Per Cycle: A Nine-Category Taxonomy of Pedestrian Demand Registration at 38 Suburban Push-Button Crossings, and What the Controller Log Retains of It},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.x58j8t},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-the-push-button-x58j8t/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}