“That’s what we’ve come to,” Duany responded. “We’re moving cars through babies.”
It’s a good joke, but it’s also an accurate depiction of the divide between the engineers, who look for ways to move vehicles along streets and highways as fast as possible, and the most recent generation of urban thinkers, who believe that these thoroughfares need to serve a purpose beyond the pursuit of speed for its own sake.
For several decades, the engineers had the upper hand. They not only designed multilane highways in cities all over the country, but they transformed traditional two-way streets into one-way speedways, meant in large part to move commuters from their city jobs to their suburban homes as quickly as possible.
What was wrong with this? Quite a lot, actually. Fast one-way streets lead to more accidents than the old-fashioned two-way kind, they are especially dangerous for pedestrians, and they hamper street retail businesses because the drivers are going too fast to stop for them — or often too fast to even notice them. Still, one-way streets seemed to have become an inevitable piece of modern life.
But as the economist Herbert Stein once remarked, “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” That’s turning out to be true of the one-way street movement in urban America. Largely under the radar, cities in diverse parts of the country are going back to the old-fashioned two-way streets that enhance safety, give on-street retailers a break and make streets and sidewalks into something more than speedways — into the walkable territory that used to be a fundamental part of urban social and community life.
I COULD MAKE A FAIRLY LONG LIST of cities that are making this reconversion of their thoroughfares, but I’ll start with what to me is a particularly interesting one: Louisville. During the past few years, this city has gone to two-way travel on many of its center-city streets, including the primary commercial corridor of Main Street, where drivers pass the Louisville Slugger baseball museum and the city’s most prominent sports facility. In the next few years, a writer for the Louisville Courier Journal predicted in 2024, “one-way streets will gradually disappear throughout Louisville.”
It may be a bit early to assess this prediction, but some interesting evidence has already started to come in. Pedestrian fatalities, which had been increasing in Louisville at an alarming rate, were down by more than 40 percent in the first eight months of 2025. That can’t be attributed entirely to the two-way conversion or to any other single factor, but one fact is indisputable: Drivers were moving at slower speeds on many of the city’s busiest streets. And one thing we also know is that a car traveling at 35 miles an hour is many times more likely to be involved in a fatal crash than one going 25.
Indianapolis offers another example of two-way reconversion. Several of its inner-city streets were changed to one-way to benefit commuters who worked shifts at a huge RCA plant. That plant was largely closed by 1995, but the streets remained one-way, allowing drivers to race past a largely empty stretch of the city at dangerous and unnecessary speeds. They were changed back to two-way status in 2025. Altogether, Indianapolis has undertaken a dozen such transitions in the past decade at a cost of about $60 million, with nearly half of the funds coming from the federal government.
Reconversion programs have also been launched in recent years in Denver, Austin, South Bend and Chattanooga. Leaders in Chattanooga concluded that one-way streets had contributed to a substantial decline in retail business in some of its neighborhoods.
THE RECONVERSION MOVEMENT has gone beyond the alteration of one-way thoroughfares and fostered efforts to designate some of them as strictly for pedestrians. The best way to illustrate that is to make a brief historical venture overseas, to the capital of France. As late as the middle of the 19th century, Paris was marked by a profusion of narrow, winding medieval-era streets that often slowed traffic to a crawl but provided a place for residents of apartment buildings to gather in little knots to socialize. In the 1860s, the dictator Napoleon III found the congestion intolerable and commissioned the urban planner Georges-Eugène Haussmann to bulldoze the narrow lanes and replace them with a network of boulevards through which carriages could travel freely.
But Haussmann didn’t abandon the idea of streets as social entities. The boulevards were built with wide sidewalks and with medians that sported profuse and attractive vegetation. The boulevards became famous as promenades along which affluent residents and their families could stroll, show off their finery and stop for leisurely conversation with neighbors. Paris remained an outpost of civilized walkability.
There’s a recent coda to this story. Just over the past decade, then-Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo decided that too many of the city’s streets had been captured by speeding automobiles and began the process of converting many of them to pedestrian-only thoroughfares. Initially, more than 100 streets were pedestrianized for at least part of the week, and in 2025 city residents voted to go further and pedestrianize 500 more. Paris has also added several hundred kilometers of bike lanes, pedestrianized 300 streets in the vicinity of schools and banned cars from much of the territory along the banks of the Seine.
The Paris experiment has reached American cities. Over the past several years, 19 blocks along Broadway in Manhattan have been transformed into plazas or “shared/slow” streets, creating 17,000 new square feet of pedestrian space. Last year, the project was expanded to create half a dozen more pedestrian-only corridors. “Every time a new stretch of Broadway Vision is unveiled,” said former Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine, “we’re reminded of the possibility our streets hold.”
Many one-way streets fit into the category of “stroads,” a term coined by the urbanist Charles Marohn 15 years ago. Stroads are roadways that purport to be safe and pedestrian-friendly while also serving as high-speed thoroughfares, and rarely succeed at either job. They are clogged with vehicle traffic, and they are a nightmare for pedestrians to cross. Often they don’t have any sidewalks at all. Marohn likes to compare them to futons, which aren’t very good as beds and don’t work very well as couches either. It’s been estimated that 67 percent of the pedestrian fatalities in the United States occur on stroads. Marohn says that “while many engineers have tried, it is impossible to make a stroad safe.”
All of this is a clue to why the road design problem in America is bigger than one-way streets, bigger than the absence of sidewalks, bigger than motorists traveling at excessive speeds. It is a problem that tracks directly to the question of what a street is for in the first place. At this point in the 21st century, we are running out of places where we can gather outside our homes to relax and cultivate social contacts. Odd as it may sound at first, the street used to be one of those places. In a growing list of cities in urban America, it is gradually coming to play that role again.
Governing's opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing's editors or management.
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