This is how you get people across an intersection
I received this text message from my friend Sarna yesterday:
“Just went through an all walk in Chinatown, Oakland. It was AwEsOmE!“
The "Barnes Walk" at 9th and Webster Oakland, CA (photo Sarna Salzman)
I’ve used them in Taiwan; they are awesome. They send a clear message that a city’s right of way isn’t there solely for the purpose of people in cars.
The “Barnes Dance“, also called a scramble or technically an exclusive pedestrian phase, stops vehicular traffic in every direction at an intersection. During this time, pedestrians are free to cross the intersection however they want, including diagonally. There’s no double checking for cars turning right and there’s no need to cross two sections of road.
You could do cartwheels kitty-corner through the middle.
For 20 seconds or so, it’s the peoples’ road. Hence the term ‘Barnes Dance’ named after Henry A. Barnes, a traffic commissioner credited with championing the feature in Denver and NYC. Apparently, people were so happy with the feature, they’d dance across the street.
Now, what’s wrong with that? We need to spoil our people, not our cars.
Mathew Roth has an interesting article on the history of the Oakland scrambles. After a prominent pedestrian death, the community rallied the troops and set out to change the nature of their neighborhood. They obviously encountered resistance from the city, but won a trial run that was so successful that they put in more scramble intersections.
And they aren’t the only city doing this. Toronto recently adopted the concept.
Time Lapse of Toronto’s first scramble intersection
by Sam Javanrouh (he has a other videos worth a gander)
Doesn’t Traverse City deserve a scramble? Where could Traverse City put in a ‘Barnes Dance”?
Immediate ideas:
- Cass St. and Front St. downtown intersection would be perfect. A clear sign that the city takes walkability and pedestrians seriously.
- I envisioned something like this as the fix for Grandview Parkway and Division St. With an ‘on demand’ system it would only halt traffic occasionally and even at that, briefly (20 seconds).
Where else?
Have you used a Scramble?
Maybe we should just create a scramble downtown this summer…whose in?
Fantastic idea. I got chills just thinking about it. Aaah, to be an empowered, respected pedestrian.
This is how intersections work in Christchurch, New Zealand, too and it’s great fun to all cross together!
Now that’s a real CROSS walk!
These make sense if you have huge pedestrian volumes. But elsewhere they significantly increase delay to all users, including pedestrians, because they require another movement be added to the sequence. Pedestrians would not be allowed to cross parallel with moving traffic as they do now.
Actually, I think at the Front and Cass location we could maintain the current system, with an inclusion of a 12-15 second scramble built into the loop. So, peds get use the normal sequence we have now or they could wait for the scramble to go diagonal. It’d be fun!
Anything we can do to Reclaim the Streets, even if it’s a small gesture, I’m going to lean more in favor than against.
And Chris, was that a pun? ooooh.
First time I saw one of these was in 1987 in Auckland, NZ. As c_maar says, they work wonderfully with a large volume of peds. I think we have those volumes during Film Festival week, but don’t think you can turn such a system on & off without way too much confusion. Also, on Front St, the ped crosswalks work very well.
Does it strike you that we are really slow to try out those things that work elsewhere? Geez, lets do boulevards & left turn lanes — since that’s what we understand. Pu-leeze!