A great piece on why one way streets can be real problems

"Time to end one-way thinking," by Matt Hanka and John Gilderbloom, from the Louisville Courier-Journal.

In response to the piece from the paper, Jackie Green wrote to Professor Gilderbloom:

Cars and trucks killed 23 pedestrians in Jeff County in 2007. Two way streets are slower.

Slower is safer. Mine is a vote for 2-way streets. In the words of Barry Zalph: downtown Louisville has a damnable random mix of 1- and 2-way streets, making it very difficult to navigate unless you have the streets and their directions memorized. It is frustrating for a visitor to know that a destination is within a short distance but to have no idea how to get there by car or bicycle because of an irrational street network. More importantly, drivers inexperienced with the lack of a Louiville street pattern make the current Louisville downtown street grid needlessly dangerous. It might be wiser to see the downtown street grid reconfigured into some orderly pattern, e.g., ALL streets 2-way, or all E-W streets 1-way with all N-S streets 2-way, - some pattern that an ordinary driver could easily memorize.

In favor of 2-way over 1-way:

1) 2-way reduce temptation for bicyclists to ride against traffic on 1-way streets to avoid going 2 or more blocks out of their way.
2) 2-way reduce the distance motorists and right-way cyclists need to travel between nearby points, because 1-way streets often force users to go blocks out of their way to find streets going in the appropriate direction.
3) A left-turning bicyclist on a 2-lane, 2-way street does not need to cross multiple lanes of overtaking traffic to position him- or herself for the left turn.

In favor of 1-way over 2-way:

1) On a multi-lane 1-way street, a bicyclist can almost always occupy a full lane without delaying motorists at all. I choose one-way streets for almost all of my downtown riding for that reason.
2) A bicyclist or motorist making a left turn from a 1-way street never needs to stop in the middle of moving traffic on both sides to wait for an opportunity to make the turn. Once you merge into the left lane, you're good to go. Slower is safer.

Make them all 2-way.