gm2

Mickey's fans have to work, else they couldn't afford to set foot inside the park.

Wait a second, 300 kcal = 1255.2 kjoules, this answer has a 25.52% margin of error! That is unacceptable and I will not approve your thesis on this subject.

I will say that I've been to some Michelin star places, and only one of them is what I would call excellent (Il Buco in Sorrento.) We went to a two star place in Milan and... It wasn't the best restaurant we went to that week. By far the most expensive, though.

I can highly recommend Il Caminetto just north of Varenna, Italy though. Outstanding food and service for about 40€ per person including wine.

FYI, they are inductive loops, not magnetic. Small difference, I admit.

/also a traffic engineer

The pedestrian buttons are designed to work thusly:

You press the button. That sends a signal to the controller that there is a ped who wants to cross the street. In most cases, it will wait until the time in the cycle when the corresponding vehicular movement is scheduled to get some green time. At that time, you will see the walking man sign on the pedestrian signal head to tell you when to walk.

What it won't do is stop opposing traffic early so that you can cross. It just lets the controller know that there is a pedestrian crossing the road, and that it should not allow the cross-street phase to terminate early if there are no cars there to use it. It will time your pedestrian interval so that you can cross the street.

But, if you are crossing the side street instead of the main street, it is likely that the main street was already going to get its full amount of green time anyway, so your pressing the button doesn't do much except show the walking man indication on the pedestrian signal head to tell you when it's safe to walk. The timing of the green intervals won't change.

I guess the answer to your first question is that it may change the operation of the signal a bit, if you are crossing the main street instead of the side street, but otherwise it doesn't change the operation of the signal much. Assuming that you are at a fairly heavily traveled intersection, at least. If you are at a signal where there is very light traffic, then you might get extra green time to cross as a pedestrian that normally wouldn't be given, because the streets at that intersection may not be programmed to allow so much green time for so few vehicles.

As for the weight sensors - they are used in some places, but they depend on the pedestrians standing at a known location, and they are prone to failure because people like to hit the button and then kind of mill around, and they may not stand on the correct spot to trigger the pedestrian phase.