When cities impose traffic and signage rules in the name of progress, be afraid. Logic and civil liberty are destined to become roadkill.
Consider the case of Brian Thornton, who owns two barber shops in Thornton. When he recently opened the newest one, Brian’s Barbers on Pearl Street, he tried to put up a barber pole out front to attract customers, but he was prevented by city sign codes. The problem is Brian Thornton’s pole rotates, and the city of Thornton’s code bans new signs that move mechanically.
“It’s related to public safety,” Robin Brown, a senior analyst with the City Development Department, told The Denver Post. “We don’t want signs to be distracting, especially to motorists.”
It’s hard to imagine anyone making such a statement with a straight face. Barber poles, distracting? What about cellphones, GPS devices and iPods? What about flashing neon signs, giant billboards with provocative images, poorly designed highway signs and roads, street signs so small you need binoculars to read them and lanes that aren’t clearly defined?
What about the guy on two skinny tires and 15 pounds of aluminum who thinks he’s Lance Armstrong and wants to share the highway at 45 mph? How about panhandlers on busy corners? And, finally, what about those poor people who labor in one of the world’s worst jobs, the sign-spinners who stand on curbs, suffering the elements, the exhaust, the verbal abuse and the humiliating costumes to advertise everything from mattresses to income-tax preparation?
The list of driver distractions is almost endless. To single out rotating barber poles is ridiculous.
Thornton planning officials will meet in May to discuss potential changes to the sign code to allow rotating signs, with some size and placement restrictions. We can only hope they give their anti-barber pole ordinance the good haircut it deserves.
Speaking of haircuts, anyone who gets one in downtown Denver may find the task more time-consuming after May 14. That’s when the city will reconfigure its 235 downtown traffic signals to make the waits at intersections even longer.
The signal cycle — the time it takes for a traffic light to change from green to yellow to red and back to green again — will be increased to 90 seconds from the current 75 seconds.
I don’t know about you, but I already avoid the area whenever possible. Getting around downtown is like salsa dancing in a bathroom stall. Why do they want to make it worse?
According to city traffic officials, the longer traffic signals are necessary because the light-rail trains, now three cars long, are adding a fourth car, and they need more time to get through some intersections. Apparently on shorter city blocks, the four-car trains are so long they would block traffic if they had to stop at the intersection.
Also, new federal standards require the city to allow pedestrians more time to cross the street. Americans walk slower than they did in years past. City traffic officials told The Post’s Jeremy Meyer that crosswalk signals must be adjusted to assume walkers travel 3.5 feet per second, instead of the 4 seconds the signals are calibrated for now.
The longer light-rail trains and our slower walking pace have doomed a proud Denver tradition and city first: the Barnes Dance. The maneuver, invented 60 years ago by Denver’s first traffic engineer, Henry Barnes, stops all traffic at intersections, allowing pedestrians to cross diagonally.
Traffic flow improved and Barnes was hailed as a visionary for getting pedestrians and drivers to their destinations just a bit faster.
“Denver became a model of urban traffic management as the system was adopted worldwide, and Barnes went on to tackle gridlock in Baltimore and New York,” Meyer wrote.
But times change. So it’s so long, Barnes Dance, hello multimodality.
“Our goal is to balance everything,” said Brian Mitchell, Denver’s chief traffic engineer. “We want downtown Denver to be a multimodal system for pedestrians, cars, transit and bicycles.
“We want all of them to be part of the system.”
So next week, when you see city workers dismantling downtown traffic signals and painting over the old diagonal striping at 45 intersections, try not to think of it as losing the Texas Two Step, but rather gaining a very slow waltz.
Freelance columnist Mary Winter (mwinte@aol.com) of Denver writes for the op-ed page twice a month.
