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Emily Badger writes in the Washington Post that a study shows that one-way streets are bad for everyone but speeding cars with an analysis done on 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 crash is twice as high for people riding through neighborhoods with one-way streets. What is more interesting though is that crime is higher and property values are lower in census tracts with one way streets..
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 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.
Some of the findings are 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 accidents. What's more interesting is that crime flourishes on neglected high-speed, one-way, getaway roads and that two-way streets may be less conducive to certain crimes because they bring slower traffic and, as a result, more cyclists and pedestrians, that also creates more "eyes on the street"—which, again, deters crime. "What we’re doing when we put one-way streets there is we’re over-engineering automobility," says William Riggs, "at the expense of people who want a more livable environment."
(Score: 4, Insightful) by mendax on Wednesday April 22 2015, @03:44AM
Whoever wrote this article I think may be a purveyor of junk science. Of course one-way streets are faster. That's why cities choose to chance their traffic patters to use them: to get traffic to move more quickly. With regard to safety, however, I think that is debatable. Anyone who has been a pedestrian in San Francisco, for example, takes their lives in their hands crossing a street because people there drive like maniacs... on both that city's one-way and two-way streets. The same applies to Manhattan.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by GungnirSniper on Wednesday April 22 2015, @04:27AM
Slowpokes, old people, and sticklers for the rules are all in favor of using the "safety" argument to bring us to heel. These are the same folks who demand "If you'd just take twice as long to get everywhere bad things wouldn't happen!" as though they've forgotten the nature of humanity and the impatience of youth.
Boston implemented one-way streets in response to the dramatic snowfall this winter, and it was overwhelmingly appreciated by the residents. [wbur.org]
It's probably too early to get meaningful statistics from the change.
Tips for better submissions to help our site grow. [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 22 2015, @10:02AM
You are confusing the speed obsession of the modern western world with the nature of humanity.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 22 2015, @03:34PM
I've had to drive a box truck through some of those roads, believe me it is wonderful to have a clear set of rules. Unfortunately there has literally been time where I've had to block a whole street because there was nowhere my truck could fit off the road. Generally if I knew I was going to run into that though I tried to be prepared and spend as little time as possible in the road, but when what I did was life and death, it tended to be forgiven.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Marand on Wednesday April 22 2015, @05:08AM
The same applies to Manhattan.
Like hell it does. Much of the day, you can't drive fast enough in most of Manhattan to do anything dangerously except honk[1]. You can often walk from one location to another in less time than it takes to drive the same distance -- I've done it before. People mostly stick to crosswalks and wait for the correct lights, but if the traffic's congested enough, all bets are off. That's not even getting into some of the side roads in lower Manhattan, like around Little Italy, where people just don't give a fuck and walk around in the streets where they want. If you make the mistake of driving down one of those roads you'll be there forever because of it.
All that said, it's still one of the best organised street layouts I've encountered[2]. With some exceptions, most of Manhattan's roads make a neat grid of alternating one-way streets. Despite the massive congestion, traffic still manages to flow pretty well, and it's easier to make turns, or cross streets as a pedestrian, because of the one-way traffic. I'd hate to see what kind of cluster-fuck NYC would be without any one-way streets to keep things moving well. Intersections are congested enough already, and I imagine the effects on pedestrian traffic (crosswalks) would make the traffic even more of a mess on top of the changes needed for two-way traffic.
[1] Unless it's a taxi, that is. Somehow they manage to drive dangerously even when nobody else can move, without even a pretense of following traffic laws. They'd drive on the sidewalks if they thought they could get away with it and there's a fare hailing.
[2] If you look at Manhattan with something like Google Earth it looks like something you'd create in Sim City, the streets are so regularly spaced. Unlike, say, Baltimore, Philadelphia, or Atlanta, which all look like they were made by lunatics in many places.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday April 22 2015, @09:04PM
You don't drive in Manhattan (that is, between the West Side highway and FDR drive on the east side) if you want to get around. That's insanity. The only way to get around reasonably during the day and well into the evening is to take the subway and walk the last bit. In the wee hours, taxis are better if you have the money and if all the clubbers haven't grabbed them already. Bikes, however, are becoming a very decent option thanks to all the protected bike lanes Bloomberg put in.
The only reason traffic moves at all in Manhattan is because of the one-way streets. Nobody would get anywhere if they had to contend with people driving the other way cutting across their lane to make a left-hand turn (and believe me, people in this town make that left dangerously and preemptively instead of waiting for oncoming traffic to clear). It's delay enough that you have to wait for all the pedestrians to thin out enough to gingerly ease across the crosswalk.
So yeah, I'd call the article bogus too.
Washington DC delenda est.