Not exactly relevant to the overall discussion but I've been dreaming for a long time about programming an elevator such that it arrives faster and skips other floors if a user frantically pushes the call button repeatedly. Same for traffic lights with push buttons.
There are apocryphal stories about elevators that let you push/hold buttons to cancel floor selections (eg, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQSdKe5kArA) or skip floors. I often forget to try them, but on the few occasions I've remembered nothing has happened.
All elevators accept a standardized fire/security key that enables "exclusive" mode that lets you tell the lift "go to this floor" and it will do so: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Uh_N1O3E4E (a reasonable sink of 1hr)
As for traffic lights I'm aware (at least in Australia) that they all tie back to a realtime system that lets a control room instruct lights to turn green and so forth. (Presumably the immediate action is that the lights that are currently green immediately turn orange, then red after the normal delay.) You can get summarily fired for misusing this though. I've also heard (IIRC on a TV documentary-type show) that ambulances tie into this system with live GPS tracking such that lights turn green as they approach, but this is sufficiently fantastic that I'm waiting to trust-but-verify it before I quote it with confidence.
Under normal use some traffic lights are traffic based while others have timers. The ones that are traffic based will take into consideration whether the pedestrian crossing button has been pushed and reduce the threshold value needed for the actual traffic lights to turn red. The other timer ones - like the really annoying ones outside my local mall :) - are on a fixed timer, and I try to run for that one when I know it's about to turn green, or just accept and twiddle my fingers while I wait if I miss it.
It'd be nice if elevator simulators were satisfying to write. Although, actually... I've just realized that with Unity you could have _quite_ a lot of fun :D... (hmm, I've had GPU on my wishlist for about 15 years now, now I really want one)
Maybe it's a good thing that I'm not an engineer.