Way Dismay

As I rounded the bend of the third consecutive parallelogram inscribed in exhaust that lunch hour I thought, “How green could this little dance possibly be...and where has Adams Street gone all of a sudden?” This is mono-directional insanity. Downtown had sucked me into its sick, twisted matrix, AGAIN, and I'd had it. Didn't matter that I'd been vigilant and downright familiar with my destination when I left my house. I somehow still managed to enter my street 2.5 inches beyond my destination, instantly passing the nearest available parking areas, blowing through the upcoming intersection, subsequently sweeping myself into carousel mode. Throw in the construction merges, detours, and egocentric j-walkers infiltrating the roads at full force and I ended up just as I had too many trips before--wasting gas money, emitting toxins, getting seasick and increasingly (albeit predictably) annoyed to my core, awry in the polygonal pits of turn signal-less, red light running, one-way street-filled Hades. Amidst my brewing frustration, a brief semblance of reason tells me that one-way road systems couldn’t have been created solely to infuriate me, so whose brilliant idea were they and for what practical purposes? At this point I wanted to arrange a movement to make them obsolete. This anxiety isn’t good for my health or my brake pads. Whimpering home, I was beyond eager to research this issue and gain an understanding for the pestilence that is the one-way street system.

Apparently there is great controversy over the location of the first single direction roadway, but the main contenders are: Lima, Peru, New York City, and London. For the sake of (unabashed) bias, let’s give NYC the distinction. Historians explain that New York’s theater district was so vivacious in 1791, that traffic was especially chaotic around show time. The frustrated carriage drivers began to simultaneously aim their horses’ heads east towards the river allowing the increased fluidity to temper the mayhem, and so the one-way street was born. Other cities noticed how much more orderly, safe, and efficient these paths were particularly in carrying a high volume of passengers, and began following suit in their own congested areas. This is why we find them in the heart of so many cities--good old downtown.

When you compare a one-way street to its two-way counterpart, numerous studies have shown a dramatic decrease in the number of conflict points i.e. opportunities for collision. This results in a lot fewer accidents vehicle-to-vehicle as well as vehicle-to-pedestrian, a huge bonus I must admit. Because one-ways allow for a larger traveling capacity, there's also a significant reduction in the number of stops needed (like half as many), so stop-and-go traffic,which is not only irritating but terrible on your car, is diminished as well.

Although it’s a complicated and lengthy process, cities like Montgomery, AL and Toledo, OH are surprisingly converting many of their long time one-ways into bis, in the recent years. Many of the businesses supporting this change cite reasons like "block-neglect," which asserts that since travel consistently flows away from the establishments on one end of the block, business at that end are neglected (which is how I feel when my destination just happens to fall on the wrong part of the road and I barely breeze past it only to venture twice as long to return to where I started, IF I get my bearings back at all). Two-ways also create a pedestrian-friendlier environment because they require lower speeds, which are a definite advantage. I'm not a gambling girl so I'll just utilize the services of good old Mapquest next time I need to go downtown.