Those of us who walk in New York City know the unwelcome experience of having bicyclists whizzing through pedestrian crossings when we have the light. Each year, in fact, a few hundred unlucky pedestrians in town will be injured from encounters with bicyclists, a handful fatally. With a pedestrian scramble — also known as a Barnes Dance, in honor of the traffic engineer Henry Barnes — vehicular traffic is paused in both directions; pedestrians can cross the intersection diagonally if they want. If you’ve forded Tokyo’s famous Shibuya Crossing on foot, you’ll be struck (or, rather, not struck) by the ability of hundreds, even thousands of pedestrians to swarm across the intersection without bumping into one another, let alone a car or bike.