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New configuration at Yonge and Dundas will allow pedestrians to cross in all directions, but will likely leave drivers seeing red .

JEFF GRAY
From Thursday's Globe and Mail
August 28, 2008 at 3:27 AM EDT

Starting today, one of Toronto's busiest downtown intersections - Yonge and Dundas streets, where 10-story flashing billboards, Eaton Center shoppers and Ryerson University students converge - will undergo a small but radical change meant to symbolize the city's plans to put pedestrians ahead of drivers.

Before the morning rush hour, city workers will remove coverings from new pedestrian crossing signals and unveil Toronto's first experimental "pedestrian scramble" intersection, a traffic-light configuration that stops cars in all directions with a red light to allow pedestrians to cross in all directions, even diagonally.

From behind a windshield, however, the change may not be so popular. It will mean much longer red lights for drivers to make way for this new 28-second, pedestrian-only phase in the traffic-light cycle. Currently, the longest wait at this intersection for drivers (those on Yonge Street) is 31 seconds. As of today, the longest wait for a green light will stretch to 57 seconds, and green lights for drivers will also be five to eight seconds shorter.

The scramble concept, long ago implemented in several other cities around the world, is also known as a "Barnes dance," after Henry Barnes, a traffic commissioner in Denver credited with coming up with the idea there in the 1950s and reportedly making pedestrians so happy they were "dancing in the streets."

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