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Barnes Dance, RIP

The Barnes Dance is being phased out in the city where it was born (that’s right, Henry Barnes worked there before moving to NYC). It’s apparently a victim of (increasingly popular, it seems) light rail, which just goes to show how transportation planning for intersections, as one person once described it to me, is like apportioning a pie among a variety of hungry users — you can’t add to one share without taking away from somewhere else.

The full story is here.

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This entry was posted on Friday, April 8th, 2011 at 12:50 pm and is filed under Traffic Wonkery. 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.

5 Responses to “Barnes Dance, RIP”

  1. Bossi Says:
    April 11th, 2011 at 8:38 am

    Quick correction- the Barnes Dance actually dates well before Henry Barnes’ time in NYC, Baltimore, and even Denver. When he first implemented it in Denver, he’d noted that he had seen it in use in a number of other areas. It’s likely that the configuration dates back to the earliest days of the signal; and even back to when signals were manually controlled.

  2. Bossi Says:
    April 11th, 2011 at 8:38 am

    er… by “when signals were manually controlled” I refer to the time *before* signals

  3. Mike Chalkley Says:
    April 18th, 2011 at 3:05 am

    I still, after all these years, find it incredible that pedestrian activity can be classed as illegal (I live in the UK BTW). Traffic laws have only come about because of motor traffic. There can be no ethical basis for criminalising the victims of RTAs. It’s placing responsibility for not being hit onto the pedestrian and taking it away from the driver.
    We are car-dependant in the UK but nowhere near as much as you guys. I do fear for the future of US transport.

  4. Michael Banovsky Says:
    April 19th, 2011 at 2:08 pm

    It’s still in effect here in Toronto, though we call ‘em “Scramble Crossings” here. (http://www.blogto.com/city/2009/10/scramble_crossing_at_yonge_and_bloor/)

    Fun to use, actually, if you don’t consider the term “scramble” to mean an impending car/pedestrian collision. M!

  5. David Hembrow Says:
    May 17th, 2011 at 10:17 am

    I can’t see for the life of me why this has to go away for light rail to be installed.

    Over here in NL, we’ve an increasingly large number of similar crossings for cyclists, and they’re very popular and successful.

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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.

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