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posted by LaminatorX on Wednesday April 22 2015, @02:46AM   Printer-friendly
from the some-people-go-both-ways dept.

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."

 
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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by Daiv on Wednesday April 22 2015, @01:58PM

    by Daiv (3940) on Wednesday April 22 2015, @01:58PM (#173967)

    Even though I've *been* in an accident in a roundabout, I fully endorse them whenever possible. I rear ended a guy while doing about 10 mph, because he slammed on his brakes because an old couple in front of him dead stopped in the roundabout, slamming on their brakes in the middle lane. I came round, eyeballing a guy I thought wasn't going to yield, looked up just as his brake-lights came on and *bam.* No big deal. New hood on my car. It still completely eliminated the traffic backups that I had dealt with for the prior decade.

    I mentally picture roundabouts at all my regular traffic backup locations on my way to and home from work. I wish there were more so more people could just get used to them.

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  • (Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday April 23 2015, @03:30AM

    by Reziac (2489) on Thursday April 23 2015, @03:30AM (#174193) Homepage

    And I saw two collisions in 30 seconds on a roundabout, with no one going above a crawl. Why? Because the street was solid ice, and on an icy road, the more you have to turn, the more chance of losing control.

    The reason roundabouts came into existence wasn't because they're all-around better for the flow of traffic. It's because in Europe, hardly anyone pays attention to traffic signs and signals, so traffic has to be physically forced to behave.

    Some places are starting to remove them (notably Nairobi).

    --
    And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.