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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: 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.