In a 2014 column (“Why
did the pedestrian not cross the road?”) I noted that merchants and
property owners in downtown Springfield had been fretting out loud about
automobile drivers – most of whom are speeding through the center of Old
Springfield to get somewhere else –
imperiling pedestrians in the form of shoppers, diners, tourists and lunching
workers. I drew on decades of research suggesting that a traffic system dedicated to making cars move
faster – and that is the only purpose of one-way streets — makes it more
dangerous. Also, speed renders shop
signs and display windows all but invisible to the carbound whizzing past.
A more recent study offers yet more evidence that one-way
streets are good for traffic but bad for cities, as we learn here from Emily Badger at Wonkblog:
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 . . . 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 before the
change and 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 accidents there.
Slowing traffic is not the only thing cities
must do to restore their street life, but it is a necessary thing. And converting
one-ways to two-ways is not the only way to slow traffic, and it is slower
traffic that works the wonders above described. But it is the easiest way.
This article appears in May 7-13, 2015.
