Pedestrian scramble
traffic management concept
A pedestrian scramble (or exclusive pedestrian interval, or pedestrian jubilee) is a type of traffic signal movement that temporarily stops all vehicular traffic, thereby allowing pedestrians to cross an intersection in every direction, including diagonally, at the same time.
In Canada and the United States, the pedestrian scramble was first used in the late 1940s but fell out of favor with traffic engineers due to increased delays for pedestrians and drivers. Its benefits for pedestrian flow and safety have led to new examples being installed in many countries in recent years, including the world's busiest pedestrian intersection at Shibuya, Tokyo which began operation in 1973.
Names for the crossings in specific countries include scramble intersection, scramble crossings and scramble corner (Canada), 'X' Crossing (UK), diagonal crossing and Barnes Dance (US), and scramble crossing (スクランブル交差点, sukuranburu-kōsaten) (Japan).
Development
The name "Barnes Dance" commemorates traffic engineer Henry Barnes while alluding to a barn dance. While he did not claim to have invented it himself, Barnes was a strong advocate of it, having observed the difficulties his daughter experienced on her way to school. He first introduced it in his home city of Denver in the late 1940s. Around that time, the pedestrian scramble was being tested separately in Kansas City and Vancouver. Barnes later brought it to Baltimore and New York City. When he became traffic commissioner of New York City in 1962, his first action was to look for intersections to implement pedestrian scrambles.
“Pedestrian scramble” enters the record as traffic management concept. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Pedestrian, scramble and traffic can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1208212. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1973 and 1962.
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This entry incorporates text from “Pedestrian scramble” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.