page_title: Pedestrian scramble
section_title: Development
hierarchical_section_title: Pedestrian scramble / Development
caption_attribution_description: eigene Aufnahme
context_page_description: A pedestrian scramble, also known as scramble intersection and scramble corner, 'X' Crossing, diagonal crossing, exclusive pedestrian interval, or Barnes Dance, is a type of traffic signal movement that temporarily stops all vehicular traffic, thereby allowing pedestrians to cross an intersection in every direction, including diagonally, at the same time.
  It was first used in Canada and the United States in the late 1940s, but it later fell out of favor with traffic engineers there, as it was seen as prioritizing flow of pedestrians over flow of car traffic. Its benefits for pedestrian amenity and safety have led to new examples being installed in many countries in recent years.
context_section_description: The name "Barnes Dance" commemorates traffic engineer Henry Barnes. While he did not claim to have invented it himself, Barnes was a strong advocate of it, having observed the difficulties his daughter experienced on her way to school. He first introduced it in his home city of Denver, Colorado in the late 1940s. Around this time, the pedestrian scramble was being tested separately in Kansas City and Vancouver. Barnes later brought it to Baltimore and New York City. When Barnes became traffic commissioner of New York City in 1962, his first action was to look for intersections to implement pedestrian scrambles. The first pedestrian scramble was installed ten days after he took office at the intersection of Vanderbilt Avenue and 42nd Street, to great acclaim. Following the success of this first scramble, Barnes began adding more scrambles across the city, at Wall Street; 42nd Street at Fifth Avenue and at Madison Avenue; and Brooklyn.
  In his autobiography The Man With the Red and Green Eyes (1965) Barnes recorded that a City Hall reporter, John Buchanan, first coined the phrase by writing that "Barnes has made the people so happy they're dancing in the streets." Barnes later said, "As things stood now, a downtown shopper needed a four-leaf clover, a voodoo charm, and a St. Christopher's medal to make it in one piece from one curbstone to the other. As far as I was concerned—a traffic engineer with Methodist leanings—I didn't think that the Almighty should be bothered with problems which we, ourselves, were capable of solving."
  However, the Barnes Dance—officially known as an "exclusive pedestrian interval" because vehicular traffic is stopped in all directions during a pedestrian scramble—caused gridlock in some cities where it was implemented, such as New York City, where congestion increased due to longer wait times for lights. Robert Moses disliked the scrambles because they held up traffic. In locations such as Washington, D.C., pedestrian scrambles shorten the time allotted to each traffic-signal phase by one-third. One study of exclusive pedestrian intervals in Greenwich, Connecticut, found that it offered no extra benefits compared to a "concurrent pedestrian interval" where pedestrians cross when parallel traffic has the green light. In the United States, the 2009 Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices allows pedestrian scrambles.
caption: A scramble crossing in Cologne, Germany
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