Another benefit of these is that, as a pedestrian, if you need to go diagonally across the intersection, you can just do so, without having to make two crossings.
An intersection in Honolulu near where we usually stay when we visit just recently (in October) switched to "pedestrian scramble" mode, and it's amazing. This intersection was excessively annoying, because previously one of the four possible crossings inexplicably disallowed pedestrians entirely, so if you wanted to get from "our" corner to the opposite one (where there's an often-visited ABC Store), you'd have to wait for three pedestrian light changes to get there. Honolulu is annoyingly pedestrian unfriendly (traffic light cycles are very long and favor cars), so it could previously take 4-5 minutes to make that simple crossing.
An intersection in Honolulu near where we usually stay when we visit just recently (in October) switched to "pedestrian scramble" mode, and it's amazing. This intersection was excessively annoying, because previously one of the four possible crossings inexplicably disallowed pedestrians entirely, so if you wanted to get from "our" corner to the opposite one (where there's an often-visited ABC Store), you'd have to wait for three pedestrian light changes to get there. Honolulu is annoyingly pedestrian unfriendly (traffic light cycles are very long and favor cars), so it could previously take 4-5 minutes to make that simple crossing.