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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.1

Speed and modal hierarchy

Design speed & speed limit

[SPEED LIMIT 30] [SPEED LIMIT 35] [SPEED LIMIT 40]
Follows the Arterial density-tiered baseline for its typical Compact, Urban, and Core contexts.

See Design Speed & Speed Limits.

Modal hierarchy

Transit> Pedestrian> Bicycle> Vehicle> Freight
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.

Default (No Parking, No Direct Property Access) (ART-DEF-01) (the two-way form this page's own citation, Riggs and Gilderbloom's evidence-based research on two-way conversion's livability gains, supports converting to, rather than the base order this pattern deliberately retains without reassigning)

References

  1. Evidence-based Riggs, W. and Gilderbloom, J., "Two-Way Street Conversion: Evidence of Increased Livability in Louisville," Journal of Planning Education and Research 36(1), 2016.