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Agricultural Traffic Calming

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle reports on a radical new traffic calming device potentially coming to my borough:

“It was also suggested that “barn-stands” be put in place at every intersection along Tillary, which would allow simultaneous crossing on all four sides and diagonal crossing from corner to corner — similar to what is permitted at Court and Montague streets in Downtown Brooklyn.”

What a lovely idea! Maybe even a petting zoo or two. There’s nothing nicer than a — wait, what’s a barn-stand? The stands inside a barn? A news-stand shaped liked a barn?

The writer actually misheard, in the style of “Kiss this Guy” and other misunderstood lyrics, a reference to a “Barnes Dance,” not a quaint Amish tradition but named for former NYC traffic commish Henry Barnes (though he invented the concept in Denver), and it refers to an “all-way pedestrian scramble” in which pedestrians briefly have right of way at all intersection crossings.

Still, I wouldn’t mind buying my NYT from a little red barn…

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This entry was posted on Friday, January 30th, 2009 at 8:46 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “Agricultural Traffic Calming”

  1. 2fs Says:
    January 30th, 2009 at 11:22 am

    Ha. I can see “barn-stands” though…in that the square-with-X-through-it pattern delineating these crosswalks might create kinda looks like the side of a barn (planks of wood on borders, an X of planks for reinforcement)…

  2. disgruntled Says:
    January 30th, 2009 at 1:59 pm

    We have those in the UK. I’m not sure what they’re called officially but we call them ‘green ninja crossings’ because of the awesome powers of the green man (the walk symbol).

  3. tim in chicago Says:
    February 2nd, 2009 at 9:43 am

    Funny. This possibly may be the first, and most popular traffic engineering mondegreen:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondegreen

  4. David Hembrow Says:
    February 5th, 2009 at 1:19 am

    We have crossings like this for cyclists. Not only do they allow cyclists to all go at once, with no risk at all of collisions with motor vehicles, but cyclists get two greens per cycle, so have half the waiting time of and more efficient journeys than motorists. I’ve a couple of videos showing the crossings here.

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Traffic Tom Vanderbilt

How We Drive is the companion blog to Tom Vanderbilt’s New York Times bestselling book, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), published by Alfred A. Knopf in the U.S. and Canada, Penguin in the U.K, and in languages other than English by a number of other fine publishers worldwide.

Please send tips, news, research papers, links, photos (bad road signs, outrageous bumper stickers, spectacularly awful acts of driving or parking or anything traffic-related), or ideas for my Slate.com Transport column to me at: info@howwedrive.com.

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For editorial inquiries, please contact Zoe Pagnamenta at The Zoe Pagnamenta Agency: zoe@zpagency.com.

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