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Consider Franklin Street in Juneau, Alaska. It illustrates the lowest capacity one-way street to the lowest capacity two-way street.
Franklin Street (One-way section):
Franklin Street (Two-way section):
Where do people park on the two-way section? Side streets? Parking garages? Having on-street parking is a bonus and helps stimulate economic activity by at least holding out the possibility of getting a parking space close to your destination. It also provides a buffer between the pedestrians on the sidewalk and the traffic moving along the street, thus enhancing the pedestrian experience.
That is also true, though more often than not, a large one way road is used to move traffic through at a faster speed.
Well, effective use of one-way pairs requires short blocks, lots of traffic signals, careful signal timing, and, most importantly, engineers and a DoT that can and will implement slow but steady traffic flow. If you don't have all of those together, you effectively have half an expressway instead of a one way street. If you have long blocks, 14 foot lanes three abreast + street parking, and/or an LoS-oriented DoT, you're going to get high speeds.
I tend to agree with the above. It's not necessarily whether the road network is 1-way vs. 2-way. What matters much, much more is how wide the road is, how wide the lanes are, and whether the lights are in fact timed for a "low speed green wave." Design speed and enforcement matter!
I don't care if it's one-way or two-way, 4-6 lanes of high speed traffic with 12-14 ft lanes will not be very pedestrian friendly, and it will not help local businesses. All that encourages is through traffic. Most examples that I've seen where the neighbourhood improved by going from 1-way to 2-way, there was also a significant road diet, often with bike lanes, street parking, and wider sidewalks, which are more important factors than the fact that it changed to two-way flow. Narrow (2-lane maximum), slow speed one-way couplets can work quite well, and on top of that they eliminate the possibility of head on collisions. Unless, perhaps, if the blocks are too long, but even then you put a garage in the center and people can park close to either side. But one-way couplets get a bad rap because they're almost invariably 3-6 wide lanes in each direction, and the lights are timed to optimize traffic volume not to manage speeds.
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