companies either imported equipment from Nagoya Electric Works in Japan that used existing cuckoo-chirp recordings or copied the sounds for their own designs. The original recorded calls are believed to belong to the Common Cuckoo, a migratory species common across most of Europe and Asia that regularly strays to Alaska. In many cases, the cuckoo-chirp signal was the first audible cue available to blind or visually impaired people to help them cross the street.Īt the time, U.S. Though visible pedestrian signals were first installed in the United States in the 1930s, audible signals only began to spread in the 1970s when disability advocates fought for a range of accessible infrastructure such as curb cuts. “They should not be put in as new signals.” “But cuckoo-chirps should be going away as soon as traffic signals are updated,” she says. Davidson is a blind person who works with guide dogs and their handlers as outreach manager at Guiding Eyes for the Blind, a New York non-profit. “When that was all there was, we were grateful to have it,” says Becky Davidson, chair of the Environmental Access Committee of the American Council of the Blind. After decades of widespread use, they’re being phased out after the federal government, in 2009, recommended a switch to other sounds-in no small part because pedestrians sometimes confused crosswalk chirps with actual avian singing. The sounds provide the same information as visible signals-when it might be safe to cross the street-for pedestrians who are blind or visually impaired.īut the age of the bird-call pedestrian crossing is drawing to a close. The setup, which plays one (the cuckoo) for north-south crossings and another (the chirp) for east-west, is called a cuckoo-chirp signal, and there’s a hint in the name: Both sounds are reportedly based on recordings of cuckoos from Japan, where the technology was first developed. The other chirps approximately once per second. One alternates between two tones, like a cuckoo clock. Whenever certain pedestrian signals changed to "walk," one of two bird-like electronic noises played. But for years, the soundscapes at intersections across America shared something remarkable. Every city has a distinctive sound-a blend of street traffic and distant sirens, rustling leaves and urban wildlife.