Does hitting the walk signal make the traffic light turn green faster?

In KIRO Radio’s Chokepoints series, we take a closer look at the traffic issues plaguing commuters in the Puget Sound region.

In a follow-up to our earlier story on traffic signals as a potential reason for huge backups on Mercer Street, we were asked:

Does hitting the walk signal button a bunch of times makes a difference in changing the light faster?

Seattle signal timing supervisor Saeed Nowkhasteh explained how it works, and this is what you need to know.

Most of Seattle’s lights are pre-timed. They switch after a pre-determined amount of time, whether there is cross-traffic or not.

But on optimized and controlled mainline streets like Mercer Street, the side street lights need to be triggered by a pedestrian or a car.

The mainline has a green light for a certain amount of time during each cycle. If there is no traffic or are no pedestrians on the side street to trigger the signal, when that mainline green light cycle ends, the time that would have gone to the side street goes to the mainline, basically extra time for the mainline. The side street signal doesn’t turn green.

So, if you arrive on that side street in what should have been that street’s green, you have to wait until that bonus green light cycle on the mainline is over and the mainline’s normal green-light cycle ends before you’ll get the green or walk signal on the side street.

And there are a few other footnotes from our discussion on traffic signals.

The city does change the timing on certain corridors to handle extra traffic from events. When an event is letting out at Seattle Center, for example, the lights on Mercer get longer greens to move more cars per cycle.

There is also no standard length for green light in the city. It all depends on the length of the blocks between lights, the normal amount of cars using the street and other metrics.

So no. It doesn’t matter how many times you hit the button.