There’s a Facebook post going around about “pedestrian scrambles”—intersections where every car stops and pedestrians cross in all directions.
It’s a simple concept that saves you from being turned into road kill by a turning car.
The video goes onto tell us that “over 40% of pedestrian crashes happen at intersections,” and after scrambles are implemented “severe crashes have gone down by 63%.”
More cities are using them—they’re now in Los Angeles, Portland and Washington, DC.
Okay, that’s nice, but innovative? No, that makes it sound like something that the Americans have just invented.
Melbourne has had a crisscross, as we called them, for as long as I can remember at Elizabeth Street, across the road from the Flinders Street Station. Albury, a town on the border of NSW and Victoria also has one.
According to Wikipedia, Vancouver was one of the first cities in the world to use them at Granville and Georgia and Granville and Hastings Streets way back in the 1940s. After that it caught on with a traffic engineer from Denver, Colorado who introduced the scramble to his city in the late 1940s and it became known as the Barnes’ Dance, because “Barnes had made people so happy they’re dancing in the streets.”
London, Ontario has had one since the 1960s, and many cities in Canada have them including Calgary and locally here in Steveston, BC.
Toronto has at least three but took out its Bay and Bloor scramble after a staff report that sideswipes had more than doubled and rear-end crashes were up by 50% “likely due to increased driver frustration.”
The scrambles stayed in Vancouver until the ‘60s when they were nixed because they put pedestrians before cars. More recently, plans to introduce one along Robson Street were cancelled because they could prove confusing for the blind.
Nothing, I’m sure that couldn’t be fixed by a little innovation.
So, what do you think, should we scramble our busiest crossings or leave them alone?
And while we’re at it, let’s bring back the streetcar.
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