Emeryville announces plan to eliminate 'beg buttons' at crosswalks in response to COVID-19

No longer any need to touch pedestrian push buttons in Emeryville. The city will automatically activate pedestrian signs when the traffic light changes. No longer any need to touch pedestrian push buttons in Emeryville. The city will automatically activate pedestrian signs when the traffic light changes. Photo: Douglas Zimmerman/SFGate Photo: Douglas Zimmerman/SFGate Image 1 of / 49 Caption Close Emeryville announces plan to eliminate 'beg buttons' at crosswalks in response to COVID-19 1 / 49 Back to Gallery

At the conclusion of the Emeryville Public Works and Transportation Committee meeting on Thursday, civil engineer Ryan O'Connell made an announcement that warmed the hearts of pedestrian activists across the Bay Area.

“You no longer need to press pedestrian push buttons,” O’Connell said, explaining that the buttons would be automatically activated when the traffic light changed. “We’re doing this as a COVID-19 response to help mitigate the spread of the virus.”

Emeryville's (nominally temporary) elimination of pedestrian push buttons, sometimes derisively labeled as "beg buttons," follows requests from councilmembers John Bauters and Ally Medina. According to O'Connell, laminated placards informing pedestrians of the policy change will sit above the push buttons. It appears the placards are already in place: on Thursday afternoon, Bauters wrote on Twitter that "staff have changed all of the city-operated intersections."

There are a couple of caveats. The elimination of beg buttons will not apply to buttons on poles controlled by CalTrans, including those on the major thoroughfare San Pablo Avenue. And the feature of the buttons that plays audio for the benefit of visually impaired pedestrians will remain in place.

Pedestrian activists often lambast "beg buttons" on social media and in op-ed articles in urbanist publications. In a viral Twitter thread from 2018, Luke Klipp explained why "beg buttons" draw the ire of pedestrians.

"Beg buttons are a reflection of the lengths to which traffic engineers have gone to save people in their cars a few *seconds* here and there, at the expense of added *minutes* here and there for people walking," Klipp wrote. "Beg buttons add minutes of delay for pedestrians."

Bauters, the Emeryville councilmember who helped push for this change in Emeryville, generally agrees with this assessment. Bauters and Medina first initiated the process of eliminating pedestrian push button months before the COVID-19 crisis hit the United States, asking staff to put together a study to assess the impact of eliminating the infrastructure.

"When you think about it at a high level, why should somebody have to push a button to get a walk signal when the light turns green?," Bauters told SFGATE. "It doesn't really make a lot of sense. There should be prioritization for pedestrians."

The change is technically temporary, meaning the city manager and public works departments could automatically activate the buttons without a vote from the Emeryville City Council. Bauters hopes to permanently eliminate the buttons once the staff's study, which Bauters says is nearly complete, is concluded.

"Having a pedestrian have to go to a specific location to select a walk signal and having to wait for a walk signal on a cycle that it's timed onto didn’t seem to make a lot of sense to us if we’re trying to activate spaces and encourage people to use sidewalks as opposed to vehicles," Bauters says. "Every city should be doing this."

Michael Rosen is an SFGATE digital editor. Email: michael.rosen@sfgate.com.