The only lesson to learn from this is to be mindful of the post hoc fallacy, but absolutely nothing about crosswalk buttons. Why? Because many crosswalk buttons in NYC are still hooked up, and elsewhere so are many others.
Someone else pointed out the situation with elevator “close door” buttons. The truth is that all elevators, at least in the US, have to have close door buttons. But these only have legally defined functionality when the elevator is in fire service mode (when someone is using the key), in normal operation they don’t have to do anything so sometimes they do nothing and sometimes they close the door.
