Kiwis get Barnes Dancing
Inspired by North American traffic management trends, New Zealand introduced the Barnes Dance system in 1958. Ruby Macandrew looks at their rise in popularity, subsequent demise and, now, recent revival.
Inspired by traffic trends half way across the world, on August 21, 1958, Auckland’s Queen St became the first place in New Zealand to utilise a Barnes Dance crossing system, allowing pedestrians to cross in any direction at the same time.
The concept, also known as a pedestrian scramble, originally gained popularity in the late 1940s thanks to American traffic engineer Henry Barnes. While Barnes made no claim to have invented it, he was a strong advocate, having observed the difficulties his daughter experienced on her way to school in Denver, Colorado.
Less than a decade later, New Zealand found itself mimicking Barnes’ system, not only in Auckland but in several other cities, notably in Colombo St, Christchurch, and at Cargill’s Corner in South Dunedin.
As the use of vehicles rose exponentially, the pedestriancentric ‘‘dance’’ came under fire, with traffic engineers and city planners throughout the country gradually phasing out the oncepopular crossings.
When Auckland’s Mayoral Drive was constructed in the 1970s it was not created as a Barnes Dance – a sign of changing attitudes towards the traffic management model.
The dilemma here was mirrored in the US, where the Barnes Dance – officially known there as an ‘‘exclusive pedestrian interval’’ because traffic is stopped in all directions – caused gridlock in some cities, such as New York City, where congestion increased due to longer wait times for lights.
In 2011, Denver, where Barnes’ concept first gained popularity, went so far as to make diagonal crossing illegal.
New Zealand has not yet followed suit, with the Queen St crossings remaining in play today, despite attempts in the early 2000s to remove them to give more priority to cars.
The Queen St and K’ Road intersection was modified in the 1990s, however, but the nearby Pitt St intersection has remained a Barnes Dance.
Additionally, some of the country’s other remaining ‘‘dance’’ intersections are more de facto, rather than planned, with no formal painting to signify their status as a diagonal crossing.
While a lot of New Zealand cities have largely given up on pedestrian scrambles, some are bringing them back, with Taupo¯ and Dunedin leading the charge.
Last year, Taupo¯ ’s only set of traffic lights was upgraded to include a Barnes Dance system to ‘‘make the traffic lights much safer for all users’’, Taupo¯ District Council infrastructure manager Denis Lewis said.
Dunedin went one step further earlier this year, with the city council opting to reintroduce Barnes Dances into the city’s traffic management plan. The first two of eight proposed sites opened in March.
The crossings had been used in Dunedin before but not since one was in place at Cargill’s Corner in the 1980s. If the changes worked well, the council signalled that Barnes Dance crossings would be considered for other intersections, including areas outside the central city.
Who was ‘Barnes’?
The name ‘Barnes Dance’ commemorates traffic engineer Henry Barnes, who first introduced the system in his home city of Denver, Colorado, in the late 1940s.
‘‘As things stood now, a downtown shopper needed a fourleaf clover, a voodoo charm, and a St. Christopher’s medal to make it in one piece from one kerbstone 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,’’ Barnes said in his 1965 autobiography, The Man With the Red and Green Eyes.
Aside from the pedestrian scramble, he made several other innovations in applied traffic engineering, including bus lanes, co-ordinated traffic signals and traffic signals that could be set off by an approaching car or by a pedestrian pushing a button.
He later brought it to Baltimore and New York. His first action upon becoming traffic commissioner of New York City in 1962 was to look for intersections to implement pedestrian scrambles. The first pedestrian scramble was installed 10 days after he took office.
Following the success of this first scramble, Barnes began adding more scrambles across the city.
Barnes recorded in his autobiography that it was a reporter, John Buchanan, who first coined the ‘‘Barnes Dance’’ phrase, writing that ‘‘Barnes has made the people so happy they’re dancing in the streets’’ when the first Denver crossing opened.