One-Way Street

ART-OWS-06
Situational / Discouraged Arterial

One-Way Street

An Arterial operating one direction of travel only, typically paired with a second one-way Arterial carrying the opposite direction nearby.

Typical at: Compact Urban Core

Suburban is an edge case. Undeveloped and Rural are unlikely pairings.

Caution

One-Way Street carries Situational/Discouraged status. It tends to encourage speeding, since drivers no longer need to watch for oncoming traffic. The modal hierarchy is retained at the Arterial base order rather than reassigned, a deliberate choice that signals the conflict between the pattern's real-world speeding effect and its nominal priority order, rather than papering over it with a different hierarchy.

#Design notes

Discouraged status here does not mean the pattern is banned; it means adopting it requires weighing the speeding tendency against whatever benefit, often traffic flow or signal progression, motivated the one-way conversion in the first place.

Unsourced claim

Formal citations for this pattern have not yet been compiled from primary sources.

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