Traffic safety and how we can make our neighborhood streets more inviting are favorite neighborhood topics. One of the simplest and lowest cost ways to slow down cars is to have 2-way way streets. Making a narrow city street 2-way really works!
It may seem counter-intuitive to have 2-way traffic on a one lane street, but you should see the difference in the speed of cars. Drivers are forced to slow down for oncoming traffic, and they a lot more in general to pay attention to, so they naturally lower their speed.
Yesterday, we found one of the narrowest 2-way streets anywhere in St. Louis. It's Bonita, in the first block west of Macklind, one block north of Loughborough. This block of Bonita leads you to one of the coolest alleys in the city, a semi-circular one serving the homes on Woodbine Court.
The next time someone tells you your street is too narrow to be 2-way, take them over to Bonita and show them how calm the traffic is.
Prefer speeding traffic down your block? Make it one-way.
For more info on the neighborhood-friendly aspects of 2-way streets, check out: streetsblog.org
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
I agree. We used to live on Arendes, a short one-way road between Holly Hills Blvd. and Bates. The speeding on this street was part of why we moved. It was out of control. I am convinced that 2-way traffic would have slowed it down, but increased the amount of through traffic. Very interesting.
According to the streetsblog site, 2-way traffic may actually reduce traffic volumes on neighborhood streets because it has a tendency to lower the amount of cut through traffic in favor of local neighborhood traffic.
of course the street is calm it is a dead end. who would drive down that street unless you live there.
It's not a dead end as far as there being no outlet. The first block of Rosa east of Hampton, that's a dead end. When you get to the end, you have to do about a six point u-turn to get back out of the street.
On Bonita, the street connects with the (2-way) alley behind Woodbine Court.
In fact, as we were entering eastbound Bonita from the Woodbine alley, we had to wait for a car heading westbound on Bonita to turn onto the alley in front of us.
See? We were traffic-calmed on our very first drive down that street!
Post a Comment