Opinion Piece: Why One-Way Streets Are The Worst

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Wonkblog at WaPo delves into street layout policy:

Why one-way streets are the absolute worst

By Emily Badger April 17 at 8:10 AM

Almost always, in John Gilderbloom's experience, the notorious streets are the one-way streets. These are the streets lined with foreclosed homes and empty storefronts, the streets that look neglected and feel unsafe, the streets where you might find drug dealers at night.

"Sociologically, the way one-way streets work," he says, "[is that] if there are two or more lanes, a person can just pull over and make a deal, while other traffic can easily pass them by."

It's also easier on a high-speed one-way road to keep an eye out for police or flee from the scene of a crime. At least, this is the pattern Gilderbloom, director of the Center for Sustainable Urban Neighborhoods at the University of Louisville, has observed in San Francisco, in Los Angeles, in Houston and Washington where streets that once flowed both directions were converted in the 1950s and '60s into fast-moving one-way thoroughfares to help cars speed through town. The places where this happened, Gilderbloom noticed, deteriorated.

"I thought about that for a long time," he says. "But we didn’t have much empirical data on it."

Where he lives now in Louisville, he and fellow researchers have begun to prove the curious link between how we engineer roads and what becomes of the neighborhoods around them. Their research offers a lot more fodder for anyone who doesn't like one-way streets simply because they're baffling to navigate.

First, they took advantage of a kind of natural experiment: In 2011, Louisville converted two one-way streets near downtown, each a little more than a mile long, back to two-way traffic. In data that they gathered over the following three years, Gilderbloom and William Riggs found that traffic collisions dropped steeply — by 36 percent on one street and 60 percent on the other — after the conversion, even as the number of cars traveling these roads increased. Crime dropped too, by about a quarter, as crime in the rest of the city was rising. Property values rose, as did business revenue and pedestrian traffic, relative to a pair of nearby comparison streets. The city, as a result, now stands to collect higher property tax revenues along these streets, and to spend less sending first-responders to collisions there.

Gilderbloom and Riggs have also done an analysis of the entire city of Louisville, comparing Census tracts with multi-lane one-way streets to those without them. The basic pattern holds city-wide: They found that the risk of a collision is twice as high for people riding through neighborhoods with these one-way streets. The property values in census tracts there were also about half the value of homes in the rest of the city.

Some of these findings are more obvious: Traffic tends to move faster on a wide one-way road than on a comparable two-way city street, and slower traffic means fewer collisions. The rest of these results are theoretically connected to each other in complex ways.

To the extent that vice flourishes on neglected high-speed, one-way, getaway roads, two-way streets may be less conducive to conducting certain crimes. If they bring slower traffic and, as a result, more cyclists and pedestrians, that also creates more "eyes on the street" — which, again, deters crime. A decline in crime and calmer traffic in turn may raise property values — which may also increase the demand of residents to police and care for their neighborhood.

"Back 10 to 15 years ago, we would have called it a 'broken windows' theory," says Riggs, an assistant professor of city planning and transportation engineering at California Polytechnic State University. That term, more recently, has gotten caught up in a broader debate about modern police tactics. In this context, though, Riggs is talking about the idea that a virtuous cycle appears in a neighborhood when signs of neglect — dangerous roads, criminal activity, abandoned homes — start to disappear.

The argument that he makes with Gilderbloom isn't so much that all one-way roads are bad, or that they contribute to these problems in every context. One-way roads can be narrow and quiet, conducive to cycling and pedestrians. And wider, faster one-way roads might achieve some of these same goals without conversion into two-way streets, thanks to other traffic-calming fixes.

Their point is that many cities decided to change these roads in the post-World War II era when we broadly re-engineered cities around the car — and that change over time came at a cost to the neighborhoods that we enabled cars to speed through.

"What we’re doing when we put one-way streets there is we’re over-engineering automobility," Riggs says, "at the expense of people who want a more livable environment."

By making these roads work more efficiently for cars, we made them more dangerous for people, we depressed the value of property around them, and we created places that also became a magnet for crime.

"The argument from a traffic engineer's perspective was that roads should be designed to get you quickly from Point A to Point B to Point C," Gilderbloom says. "That might be important in theory. But mothers don’t want that with their children. Fathers don't want that with their sons who want to play football out front like I used to do as a kid."

His argument also implies that street design can be an unlikely — and relatively cheap — tool to help revitalize neighborhoods. Those two streets Louisville converted a few years ago cost the city about $250,000.

Emily Badger is a reporter for Wonkblog covering urban policy. She was previously a staff writer at The Atlantic Cities.
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Well, the people of Southie loved the emergency one way street grid reconfiguration so much, that many residents want to keep it and the City is listening.
 
datadyne007 said:
Well, the people of Southie loved the emergency one way street grid reconfiguration so much, that many residents want to keep it and the City is listening.
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True, but that doesn't make it counter-evidence. People with cars prefer that their narrow, residential streets are one-way so that they can more easily navigate them. The point is that these streets shouldn't be so easy to navigate.
 
But if the one way streets are configured as "complete streets" they are not really faster/easier to navigate. If you have some of the opposite late and use it for cycle tracks, rain gardens, wider sidewalks, street trees, curb bump-outs, etc. I would imagine that the streetscape would be much friendlier for pedestrians, residences, cyclists.
 
Semass said:
But if the one way streets are configured as "complete streets" they are not really faster/easier to navigate. If you have some of the opposite late and use it for cycle tracks, rain gardens, wider sidewalks, street trees, curb bump-outs, etc. I would imagine that the streetscape would be much friendlier for pedestrians, residences, cyclists.
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True. Truthfully, I'm thinking more of the wide streets that are made one-way thoroughfares like Tremont near the Common more than I'm concerned about two-sided parking, one-lane residential street that are two-way, but can only fit one car at a time.

At the same time, I know that I drive much more cautiously on those narrow streets when I know they're two-way and another car might come toward me at any moment, than when I'm on a narrow on-way. Lots of people fly down those narrow, one-way residential streets. It's dangerous for any pedestrians who step out from between parked cars.
 
I guess I'd simply say that the people endorsing complete streets and calming generally have better data than the early street engineers who many many of the early (1930 - 1980) decisions on streets (one-way, wide lanes, jaywalking rules, higher speeds, etc. etc.) that only served to promote the idea that the city was a place you cut through on your way from work in one suburb to another.

Are all 1-way streets bad? No. Are most of them? Probably, but that's because most of our streets are bad.

My own street in West Medford was turned 1-way by neighborhood petition (along with a paired one one block over). Clearly this was done to promote easier on-street parking (considered the highest form of public good in Medford). If there'd been an Italian "Northie" that was the mirror of Southie, that'd be Medford of 1970.

As a result, though, our pair of streets are an ideal cut through (one lane, maybe 16 feet wide, with parking on both sides) compared to the other streets that have the same width but do both ways.
 
Jane Jacobs noted the business-killing effect of converting two-way streets into one-way streets, all the way back in the late 1950s.

Yay for more data, but, really, it's been over a half-century. It ought to be obvious by now that streets wide enough for more than one travel lane ought to be two-way streets.
 
Matthew said:
It ought to be obvious by now that streets wide enough for more than one travel lane ought to be two-way streets.
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As long as the stipulation is: wide enough once pedestrians, cyclists, and public transportation are appropriately accommodated, then I completely agree.

A good, albeit small, example of a street wide enough for more than one travel lane that ought to be a two-way street is Highland Ave in Somerville, between Cutter and Grove. This stretch, and especially the intersection of Highland and Cutter, should be altered to accommodate two-way travel.
 
Two-way streets are in general better than one-way streets. I agree with that 100%.

The big dilemma I've had lately is...
What' better: a one-way street with one travel lane and a bike lane/cycle track? Or a two-way street with one lane each direction and no bike lanes/cycle tracks? I personally would prefer the former to the latter, but it goes against the idea that two-way streets are better than one-way streets.
 
cden4 said:
Two-way streets are in general better than one-way streets. I agree with that 100%.

The big dilemma I've had lately is...
What' better: a one-way street with one travel lane and a bike lane/cycle track? Or a two-way street with one lane each direction and no bike lanes/cycle tracks? I personally would prefer the former to the latter, but it goes against the idea that two-way streets are better than one-way streets.
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Exactly. Two-way traffic isn't better if there is room for it after appropriate pedestrian/cycle/public transit accommodations. Otherwise, it is taking space away from more efficient modes of transportation.
 
Yes, after sidewalks and appropriate bike consideration is given, of course.

But small residential streets shouldn't have or need bike lanes. Car traffic should be going slowly enough to mingle safely with people on bikes or crossing on foot. Or to deal with the fact that kids are running around and playing in front of their homes.

Check out Dutch principles like "Separate where needed, mix where possible" and "Sustainable Safety".
 
Matthew said:
Yes, after sidewalks and appropriate bike consideration is given, of course.

But small residential streets shouldn't have or need bike lanes. Car traffic should be going slowly enough to mingle safely with people on bikes or crossing on foot. Or to deal with the fact that kids are running around and playing in front of their homes.

Check out Dutch principles like "Separate where needed, mix where possible" and "Sustainable Safety".
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People can argue over whether Beacon St in Back Bay is a "small residential street", but I think it is abundantly clear that it attracts people driving at high speed due to it being a multi-lane one-way street. Makes a rough go of it for pedestrians and cyclists.

http://www.myfoxboston.com/story/25839362/2-pedestrians-killed-after-beacon-street-crash

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/20...et-back-bay/Zj3GbwNGzbetoUYc18JPsL/story.html
 
dwash59 said:
People can argue over whether Beacon St in Back Bay is a "small residential street", but I think it is abundantly clear that it attracts people driving at high speed due to it being a multi-lane one-way street. Makes a rough go of it for pedestrians and cyclists.

http://www.myfoxboston.com/story/25839362/2-pedestrians-killed-after-beacon-street-crash

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/20...et-back-bay/Zj3GbwNGzbetoUYc18JPsL/story.html
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Beacon definitely is an example of a speedway when the time is right. It definitely needs a two-way diet/complete street.
 
Beacon Street is most definitely not a small residential street. It's a major arterial. And it should be converted to two-way traffic with fully protected bike lanes.
 
Southie grid is returning to normal:

Mayor Walsh said:
After thoughtful consideration and hearing from the South Boston community, we have decided to end the emergency reconfiguration. This plan relieved traffic congestion and increased public safety during our most challenging winter months, but now it is time to return to our normal traffic flow and welcome the spring season.
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http://www.universalhub.com/2015/emergency-one-way-streets-south-boston-become
 
Matthew should like this one:
http://www.somervillestreets.com/2015-pilot.html

Approved by the Somerville Traffic Commission: there will soon be a Neighborway in Somerville! Neighborways are residential streets designed for low volumes and speeds for auto traffic, where children can play and bicycle and pedestrians are given priority. They feature good street design that promotes healthy communities by creating safe, inviting spaces for children of all ages.
If you were on our Somerville Walk in April, you got a chance to hear from Mark Chase who has helped lead this effort. Learn more (including how YOU can help) at the link.
— via Somerville Bicycle Committee
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