In his old year cabaret show, Peter Pannekoek stated the buttons near crossings don’t actually do anything, they’re just there to just pacify people. I’m fairly certain they in fact do work, though for cyclists they’re mostly redundant: the magnetic loops in the road surface detect cyclists. Only for lightweight carbon bikes a manual button is still useful.
Am I correct in my assumption?
Oh, I hate running red lights, but the problem is some of these are designed to only trigger when a car is present. It doesn’t matter where you put your bicycle; it will not detect it.
I’ve sat at a red left-turn-arrow while the light changed for traffic going in other directions five times. If you don’t run the red, you’ll literally sit there forever because it will not change for you. It sucks, but this is an engineering problem.
Some countries are better at this than others. Some cities are better at this than others.
I always shake my head and cuss when I encounter something like this, because it absolutely should not exist.