Give me walkable or give me death
Those people who think they’re more likely to die from sharks than deer (you’re 300 times more likely to get killed by a deer via car collision), are probably the same who think you’re more likely to get hit and killed by a car in New York than in Arizona or South Carolina. See the graph above – not true.
Yes, there are a lot of cars in Manhattan (and Boston), for instance, but there are way more pedestrians. Not only that, only half of Manhattanites have a driver’s license, and there are efforts to close streets since pedestrians are beginning to spill off of the sidewalks.
U.S. cities are heeding the growing demand for more pedestrian-oriented cities, investing in piazzas, paseos, and finally…
Have you ever driven through a city’s downtown trying to get to your destination (or parking space) and one-way street after one-way street gets you further away from where you simply want to go? Frustrating huh? The reason? Traffic engineers wanted cars to go faster. They were right, but this was in a time when many people didn’t live in cities and commuters just wanted to get in and out of the city as fast as they could.
So yes, two-way streets are returning, pioneered by former Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist, “I think people started to realize that the city was more important than the road that runs through it.”
Chart source: International Road Traffic and Accident Database
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Wow… this is really sad. South Carolina — outside of Charleston — is desperately in need of more pedestrian-oriented urban areas.
Interesting that Norquist is cited, seeing as it’s virtually impossible to make a left turn anywhere in downtown Milwaukee, particularly the main thoroughfare (Wisconsin Ave.) True, most roads carry two-way traffic, but god forbid you should want to change direction once you’ve picked one.
Dayton is currently considering the conversion of our one-way streets to two-way, but in order to do so would require the elimination of 26%-83% of on-street parking. Sure, two-way would make it a little easier for people to navigate the city, and traffic would be slowed which is good for the pedestrian. But if there is no place to park then those benefits are trumped by the obvious negative effect of having no street parking.
Not to mention that parked cars serve as a buffer between pedestrian and auto traffic.
I was in Danville, IL for Christmas. Talk about a town long on the decline. They need more than the two-way conversions. I was in the downtown last summer on a weekend afternoon. It was absolutely dead despite a higher than expected tenant occupancy rate. It doesn’t help that they have a few suburban type big-boxes in the downtown.
I also lived in Dayton for a few years. I find it hard to believe that a study would find that of 26%-83% of on-street parking would be eliminated converting to two-way streets. There may be a few streets that would have to lose some of the on-street parking due to left turn lane additions. But you could compensate this by adding on-street parking on the much too-wide Main Street and Third Street to compensate. There problem solved.
Of course, I might have worked for the agency that produced this report, so I have no comment. Oh, who am I kidding, I always have a comment ;)