I am not the brightest spark as it took me a few months of living in a heavily Jewish area to realise that the pedestrian traffics light were configured to run every cycle so they didn't have to press the button. Probably a lot more details I also missed.
I doubt very much this is related to any local Jewish population. Most traffic buttons are placebos these days; the pedestrian signals automatically signal alongside the traffic lights.
The exception would be low-pedestrian-volume areas with lights and crossings reserved specifically for pedestrians.
You're probably correct, but having lived in northern Brooklyn for almost a decade, I wouldn't be surprised if those communities had a hand in that type of infrastructure. They already have their own police force.
Buttons in pedestrian traffic lights are far from universal, my country is not Jewish and pedestrian lights without a button are very common.
Actually I dislike those with buttons. They send the message that cars passing and pedestrians stopping is the "default", and ensure that a lone pedestrian always has to stop, regardless of luck, while establishing the ritual that pedestrians need to "beg" for being allowed to cross. In my view, cars already have too many privileges in cities, it's not the end of the world if they have to stop at an empty crossing from time to time (something that pedestrians also have to do often).
Cars have much more inertia and often more traffic than pedestrians, it makes sense to give them right of way and reduce the ambiguity with traffic control devices in most places.
If you take sidewalks away completely and turn everything into a big highway you’ll have even less pedestrian traffic. That doesn’t make it good policy.
In my area at least, if there is a pedestrian crossing across a single road, it will not be automatic, but if it's near a junction, where the lights would need to toggle anyway, the button does nothing, and it's just on a fixed timer
