Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time

by Jeff Speck

to stay competitive in the face of suburban out-migration, cities needed to retool themselves around the goal of moving suburbanites in and out of the downtown quickly. One part of this effort—the obvious part—involved building elevated interstates, with the near-suicidal outcomes that have been well documented. The other part, less discussed, involved the remaking of downtown street networks around free-flowing systems of one-way pairs. By replacing two-ways with one-ways, cities were able to introduce synchronized signals and eliminate the slowdowns caused by left turns across traffic. Like the interstates, these retrofitted streets were indeed effective at speeding commuters, enough so that there was no longer any reason to live downtown. They also turned what had once been a great urban asset—the public realm—into little more than a collection of surface freeways.