I recently published an article in Transfers Magazine with Billy Riggs questioning some of the received wisdom about one-way streets and efficiency. This builds on our recent research published in JPER modeling vehicle distance traveled before and after hypothetical one-way to two-way street conversions.
One-way streets offer many benefits for driving speed, signal timing, traffic friction, etc. But, as we note in the article:
Just as one-way streets make traffic faster, two-way streets can slow it down — improving safety, accommodating multimodal travel, increasing livability and property values, and helping customers more easily reach businesses.
But there’s also an efficiency argument for two-way streets that, though relatively small, is too often ignored:
One-way streets also have an inherent inefficiency, which leads to longer driving distances: They prevent drivers from taking the most direct route to their destinations.
Our research found that two-way street conversions (all else equal) would allow for significantly shorter average travel distances: San Francisco’s as-is network’s average intra-city trip is about 1.7% longer than it could be if it were all two-way streets, corresponding to 27 million kilometers of annual surplus travel just for intra-city trips.
For more, check out our article in Transfers Magazine or the underlying research study in JPER.