By Kevin Flynn
Inside-Lane.com

Save the last dance for me!

Denver, the city that popularized the pedestrian-friendly all-walk diagonal-crossing Barnes Dance, is considering phasing it out of the busy downtown grid as part of a larger evaluation of signal timing within the central business district.

Another Denver institution on the ropes? Could they leave the Barnes Dance, the cheeseburger and the ice cream soda in their native town and instead eliminate the Denver Boot?

“We have preliminary data from our consultant and we’re talking to stakeholders,” said Matt Wager, director of operations for traffic engineering services at Denver Public Works. “It’s a complex discussion.”

Pedestrians would still get “Walk” signals, but not the all-red diagonal crossing.

Wager said a decision is likely six months out. The “All Pedestrian Phase Study” is being done by Jacobs Engineering, while a larger retiming study of the downtown signal system, called the Downtown Denver Traffic Signal Retiming Study, is being done by Navjoy Consulting Services.
“We are taking a look at signal timing downtown and are evaluating not only pedestrians but bicycles, autos and transit,” Wager said. “We’re always evaluating signal timing downtown.”

In part, the retiming study is a response to RTD’s anticipated introduction of four-car light rail trains along Stout and California streets. The longer train consists – RTD now operates two- and three-car consists on the Central Corridor downtown – will require more all-red clearance at cross streets.

The so-called Barnes Dance refers to the inclusion of an all-red phase within the traffic signal cycle that stops vehicles on all approaches and allows pedestrians to freely cross, including diagonally. It’s called the Barnes Dance because it was brought to Denver by the city’s visionary first traffic engineer, Henry Barnes. He did not come up with it, but was the first to apply it in an entire downtown zone when it went live in 1952.

Barnes was among the forward-thinking leaders brought to town in 1947 by newly elected reformer Mayor Quigg Newton, who had ousted the tired old-school regime of Ben Stapleton. Barnes was a pioneer traffic engineer whom Newton brought in from Flint, Mich. He helped spread not only the inclusion of pedestrian movements with traffic signal timing, but also such concepts as synchronized progressive signal timing along travel corridors, which he called the “Green Wave,” actuated signals set off by a pedestrian pushing a button or the presence of a vehicle, and the fading-from-favor use of one-way couplet streets throughout the city – think 13th and 14th avenues, Eighth and Sixth avenues, York and Josephine streets, Santa Fe Drive and Kalamath Street.

In his autobiography, “The Man with the Red and Green Eyes,” Barnes said he came up with the notion for the all-walk phase while dropping his daughter off at school and watching her try to cross the street with her friends. People trying to cross the street during breaks in traffic were playing games of chicken. In a presentation in Los Angeles to a meeting of the Institute of Traffic Engineers, Barnes told them:

“As things stood now, a downtown shopper needed a four-leaf clover, a voodoo charm, and a St. Christopher’s medal to make it in one piece from one curbstone 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. Therefore, I was going to aid and abet prayers and benedictions with a practical scheme: Henceforth, the pedestrian – as far as Denver was concerned – was going to be blessed with a complete interval in the traffic signal cycle all his own. First of all, there would be the usual red and green signals for vehicular traffic. Let the cars have their way, moving straight through or making right turns. Then a red light for all vehicles while the pedestrians were given their own signal. In this interim, the street crossers could move directly or diagonally to their objectives, having free access to all four corners while all cars waited for a change of lights.”

Barnes acknowledged there were such intersections already using such a signal by the 1940s in Kansas City, Vancouver and a few other places. But Denver was where Barnes had them installed throughout the business district, where for the most part they remain in use today.

But downtown Denver has changed.

The 1982 debut of the 16th Street Mall into the traffic flow presented signal timing issues. To accommodate the transit shuttles, 16th was converted to two-way traffic from its former one-way function in the downtown grid. Engineers had to integrate efficient timing for RTD’s shuttle business going in both directions into a total 75-second cycle from green to green. Also, since the original Denver grid is platted on a 45-degree diagonal to north-south-east-west, the connections to East Denver and Golden Triangle streets east of Broadway and south of Colfax Avenue present timing issues.

Wager said Denver uses the mall shuttle movement as the starting point for setting all the other timings.

The diagonal crossing was dubbed the “Barnes Dance” after Denver Post city hall reporter John Buchanan wrote that, despite citizen and official apprehension in advance of its introduction, the innovative all-walk phase had pedestrians “dancing in the street.”

Barnes also oversaw the demise of the Denver Tramway’s 1950 conversion of the city’s extensive but aging streetcar lines to buses – having been quoted as saying he had no objection to streetcars except that they ran in the street.

Barnes departed Denver a year after introducing his dance and became traffic engineer in Baltimore, where he introduced computerized signal controls. He was hired to be New York City’s traffic commissioner in 1962 by Mayor Robert Wagner. Barnes used the all-walk phase in Manhattan, although only a few locations remain in use today.

He died of a heart attack on the job in New York in 1968, at the age of 61.

On a personal note, my own subconscious awareness of the Barnes Dance and downtown signal timing nearly got me whacked by a car when Denver altered signal timing with little fanfare years ago. While working at the Rocky Mountain News, I was in the habit of taking reading material with me when walking to appointments or lunch. The timing patterns had been inculcated into my brain for years: Named streets got the green light first, then the numbered streets, followed by the all-walk Barnes Dance.

One day, walking back to 400 W. Colfax from the Brown Palace, I stepped to the curb at Tremont Place and 17th Street, my nose in a book, looking to cross west toward 16th. When the last of the traffic zoomed past me on 17th, I started out into the street still reading, confident Henry Barnes had my back.

But I heard cars starting out from Tremont, including some making a left turn right into my path. I looked up to see a bumper coming at me, and jumped back.

I found out Denver traffic engineers had flipped the order of the signal phases east the mall. Numbered streets now went first, named streets second.