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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4 comments on “Let’s Do The Scramble”
I think that they are just darn fun…. and community building. Leaves out the guess-work.
Scrambles are a component of a bigger “new order”.
Vancouver needs a complete overhaul of how public space is allocated, and in the process, an abolishment of the sacred cow called “personal automobile transportation”.
If one were to mine the data of automobile transportation endpoints (i.e. who is driving where and when, for what?), one would likely find that development patterns need to be abruptly changed. For example, when a population lives where they don’t work, where they don’t shop, and where they don’t play you get the “let’s drive everywhere all the time” culture that is Vancouver. The fact that drivers meet (and occasionally collide with) pedestrians in intersections is a side-effect that city planners ignore.
Overhaul Vancouver, I disagree with thee. Vancouver without the car will be a wasteland. The service industry the tourism industry and almost every employee that earns less than 100gs per year likely lives a long ways from his/her job in Vancouver. The Federal government that allowed foreign buyers to drive prices into the stratosphere the CRA which decided to not investigate unemployed students buying 2 million dollar properties are the reason that Vancouvers work force doesnt live anywhere near Vancouver. So while its easy to tell all those workers to take transit to their Vancouver job its not your place to tell them that they must commute in a maner that you or any other sjw approves of.
Scramble away Vancouver.
I am going to ask around because these kind of intersection/cross walk combinations had a specific NAME here in Vancouver, but I cannot remember what it was just now. Will post it if it turns up. My recollection is that it was related to “Square Dancing” somehow…