yellow LED not turning off in traffic light simulation

Question

I wanted to make a simulation of a traffic light, and since I don't have any sensors I used a button to change between the different states (red/stop and green/drive). When the states are changing I wanted to have a short yellow blink- just like normal traffic lights work. But in the first state(green), yellow doesn't turn off. In the second the same problem occurs, but if I press the button, that I connected to GPIO pin 2, the LED turns off. It makes no sense to me, as the switch sentence turn off the yellow LED before powering the others (in both cases). In addition, I can't wrap my head around the fact that the yellow LED turns off after I press the button once more, as I only have two cases in the switch sentence, but it now seems like there is three.

void loop() {
// Turn the green led on (GPIO PIN 11) if button pressed once. If button is pressed again switch to yellow then to red.

if(switchLedBtn.pressed()) {
colour = colour + 1;
if(colour > 3) {
  colour = 1;
 }
}

switch(colour) {

// Turn off red, turn on yellow in half a second, then power green (green(0), yellow(1) and red(2))
case 1: digitalWrite(ledPins[2], LOW); digitalWrite(ledPins[1], HIGH); delay(500); digitalWrite(ledPins[1], LOW); digitalWrite(ledPins[0], HIGH); 
        break;

// Turn green off, turn yellow on for a second, then power red
case 2: digitalWrite(ledPins[0], LOW); digitalWrite(ledPins[1], HIGH); delay(1000); digitalWrite(ledPins[1], LOW); digitalWrite(ledPins[2], HIGH);
        break;

Answer 1

Your program runs in a tight loop - an extremely tight one which does all but nothing in any state but 1 or 2. However what happens in these states is interesting.

Essentially what you have is

1. Quickly check for input - which won't be detected unless the bottom is being held down at this precise narrow slice of time between long delays
2. Turn on an LED, apparently from your comment the yellow one
3. Change the LEDs but recycle so quickly that this fact is generally invisible.

The result of this is that instead of a brief pulse of yellow, you will be seeing near constant yellow, because that is the only part of your loop which takes any time.

Probably what you want to do is to advance the state when you are done with your brief yellow flash. But it's not possible to say what you should advance the state to, since it's unclear how you want this light to work. If it is purely timer-based, then you don't need any input at all; while if the button is supposed to do something but a timer should also be used, then you have a more complicated problem.

Essentially, before you can write any code you must write in words or diagrams a comprehensive set of "rules" for what the system is supposed to do.