Denver Doctor

Like many another patient suffering with a chronic disease, the city of Denver put off calling a doctor until its ailment--a corpuscular clotting of automobile traffic in its downtown arteries--grew almost unbearable. By 1947, its regular morning and evening attacks were getting progressively worse, and it had exhausted all the known home remedies. In despair it hired a greying, bucktoothed police captain from Flint, Mich, named Henry W. ("Hank") Barnes and asked him to administer some pain killer.

It was a wise choice. Traffic Doctor Barnes had come by his odd craft almost by accident. He had started out in life as an electrician after leaving his home-town Newark, N.Y., migrated to Flint to work in automobile plants. He had eased into a city job as a signal engineer and had finally got into traffic work--an achievement which was crowned when he became a member of the Institute of Traffic Engineers. In a sense, Barnes was still an intern when he came to Denver. But he saw almost instantly that he had to do more than prescribe massive medication--he also had to hog-tie his patient and shove his pills down the municipal gullet.

Irascible Patient. It was an awesome job Denver had set aside only $6,800 for traffic control in 1948. Barnes asked for $1,000,000. The mayor blanched. So did the city council. But Barnes stuck to his guns, and got a first installment of $400,000 (in four years he spent $2,000,000) He was immediately embroiled in battle with the populace at large--Denver gagged, struggled, complained vehemently that it was being victimized by a madman.

When Barnes put in one-way streets, not a few Denver citizens insisted on driving the wrong way on them. "Look, sonny," cried an irascible oldtimer who was stopped by a cop, "I've been driving this way on this street for 20 years, and no traffic engineer is going to stop me now!"

Barnes installed 30,000 traffic-direction signs along Denver streets. The citizenry complained that it was going blind just reading things through dirty windshields.

He ordered ancient spruce trees hacked down at many street corners to improve vision and was fiercely attacked by ladies of the city's garden clubs. He explained: Ladies, when we trimmed the petticoats ott those old spruces, we saw some of the funniest limbs in all Denver. Modesty alone dictates that we chop them down. . . " The ladies were not amused.

To speed up pedestrian movement on downtown street corners, Barnes set traffic lights to stop all automobiles dead for an interval and instructed people on foot to hustle across intersections, catty-cornered if they wished. The phenomenon was jeeringly christened "Barnes's dance." Barnes was unabashed. To win his critics over, he spoke at community meetings answered questions on a Thursday-night radio program, cruised through the streets for hours every week to watch traffic at firsthand.

The Brain. He not only installed 350 new traffic signals but personally invented a $115,000 electronic "brain," which controls them in a new way. Today, Denver's traffic rolls over rubber pads in the streets. The impact of tires on the pads tells the brain how heavily traffic is flowing from minute to minute, and the brain automatically adjusts whole series of lights to fit the actual flow of cars.

Barnes's prescriptions, Denver now admits--with the pleased air of a patient who is convalescing after a difficult medical treatment--have achieved wonderful results. Barnes's dance allows twelve automobiles to turn at downtown intersections on every green light where only one was able to creep through the screen of pedestrians before. Denver's evening traffic now clears up 20 minutes earlier than in 1947 although the city now has 44% more automobiles. Last year traffic deaths were down to 45, as compared with 64 in the year before Barnes took over.

This year Barnes got a really heady accolade--Baltimore, a city with one of the world's most gruesome cases of traffic congestion, asked him to spend a month diagnosing its troubles too. When he headed east last week, there was hardly a motorist in Denver who did not wish him well.

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