Comment by toast0
> With the change, the light always sits green for drivers on Palm, so cars are now always flying through that street when they previously had to stop at a stop sign. Why don’t lights ever sit idle with the pedestrian crossing on and the cars must wait?
Where I live, this doesn't happen because there's not enough pedestrians to justify it. When I drive in Seattle, the lights never idle, but pedestrian cycles are always included.
With a non-scramble intersection, not including pedestrians by default allows for faster cycling, including for pedestrians that want to cross the alternate way. With a scramble intersection, I'd bet if a pedestrian shows up and pushes the button, an idle green will go yellow immediately. Yes, it's a longer wait than crossing immediately as you would at an idle intersection, but now you can cross diagonally, so that may be a win.
It's worth checking with the traffic engineer to see how they would decide to always include a pedestrian cycle, perhaps during times of high pedestrian use like during hours where students are likely to cross the street between classes.
Too late to edit, but another option which may be too late for this intersection would be to add intend to cross buttons (or other ways of detecting pedestrian intent) farther from the intersection. Many intersections have vehicle detectors farther from the intersection which allows the traffic controller to reduce waiting by lengthening or reducing cycle times in anticipation of traffic that will arrive soon. For example: if there is a dominate traffic direction, the controller can idle at green, and traffic in that direction will often not have to wait. With detectors only at the light, traffic in the opposite direction would need to wait when it arrives; with further back sensors, traffic in the opposite direction can initiate a cycle change earlier and may not need to come to a stop at all. Or cycles in one direction can be lengthened if there is traffic detected at the light and at the further back sensor, which indicates potentially high demand in that direction, especially if the further back sensor stays active which could indicate vehicles are backed up all the way to that sensor. That's less applicable for a pedestrian detector, pedestrian backups are uncommon unless there's an event, at which point it's common to use police/traffic officers to direct traffic or a specialized event mode enabled by a physical control supervised by an officer; but indicators of more pedestrians does justify increasing the pedestrian cycle time.