Santa Monica Stripes

You may have heard of a barn dance, but have you heard of a Barnes dance? In Denver, Colorado, in the late 1940s, traffic engineer Henry Barnes was the first engineer to install the “Scramble,” a system of crosswalks that allow pedestrians to cross intersections in any direction, including diagonally. A controversial concept, the Scramble favored foot traffic over vehicle traffic and gave pedestrians a safe and controlled interval to cross streets in a way most efficient to the pedestrian. When interviewed in the Denver paper, Barnes pointed out that he wasn’t the inventor of the Scramble, and that he was merely the first engineer to apply it to a metropolitan intersection. The author wrote, “Barnes has made the people so happy they’re dancing in the streets.” Other traffic engineers jokingly referred to the Scramble as the Barnes dance. Since the 1940s, municipalities around the globe have introduced Barnes dances, aka Scrambles, to their city centers. The city of Santa Monica, Ca