Raise the Hammer

This post isn't about whether I'm in favour of one way or two way streets. It is about clearing up misleading (and I believe false) information in the article.

but one-way streets optimize for fast driving – that’s their raison d'être

I don't believe the above quote to be true. It's misleading at best.

One way streets are designed for consistent speeds to reduce the frequency of starting and stopping. To make my point more clear, although admittedly they often are not, one way streets CAN be optimized for slow driving. Our one way streets happen to be optimized to encourage a steady speed of around 50 km/h. They are not designed to optimize fast driving. Another example to illustrate my point are two way rural roads. Those streets are, in fact, optimized for high speed. It would be silly to argue that, therefore, two way streets are optimized for high speed. Would drivers drive any faster if the same streets were one way? I'm guessing not. Interestingly, it would be safer though because of the negated risk of head on collisions.

One could easily argue that two way streets encourage fast driving just as much and more than one way streets because there is potentially no penalty for driving fast. When one consistently drives fast on one way streets, they will quickly find themselves stuck at a redlight.

I can't remember how long it's been, perhaps a year or so, but some of you may remember that I posted a video of me driving along One Way Main St. and Two Way Barton St. I followed along with the flow of traffic and the speeds on Barton were consistently higher than they were on Main. I know this is just a small sample from one day and is anecdotal, but this is the reality I see whenever I drive on our city streets.

To all the naysayers who think "but I see cars speeding down our one way streets all the time", I ask if you have any way of knowing how fast they are going (if not, perhaps not as fast as you think) and if you think that if they really were speeding like maniacs, if you think those idiots would slow down because of a two way street.