It's good to see Sydney fixing their beg buttons. As a visitor, it was a bad characteristic of a city I otherwise quite like. Too bad it took COVID-19 to do this. (In the long term they should just get rid of the buttons entirely, rather than just making them useless.)

Huh, this is the first time I'm hearing crossing buttons being bad. They're extremely common in the UK. They light up when a change is pending, so you know if someone's forgotten to press it.

and common in the US, but beg buttons are just obnoxious. Sometimes they even have the beg buttons despite not even used to determine signal changes because grumble something incoherent about ADA

Fake buttons seem bad. In the UK, at a pedestrian crossing, if you press the button & it hasn't changed in a while, the change is immediate. That seems preferable to waiting for an interval + stopping cars for no one.

ah yeah, it's cool if they do that. but you see them downtown and such that has a constant stream of people, it's just a dumb game then.