> These buttons have long been decried and criticized by advocates for walking, anyway. The buttons’ purpose is less to keep people safe than to reinforce the primacy of cars on the street by forcing people who want to cross a street to “beg” for a walk signal.
This makes it sound like buttons are some kind of implement of the bourgeoise, used to "reinforce the primacy of cars" and keep the pedestrians powerless. In reality, whether pedestrians like it or not, cars are primary. The roads literally exist for cars. As a pedestrian, I would do the very difficult task of pressing a button, if it meant that as a driver I could have less traffic and hit less red lights.
