10th Anniversary Post: One Way or Two?

 

Coe Road NE is two-way as of March 2025

Cedar Rapids undertook a number of ambitious street initiatives in the 2010s, including adding bike lanes and converting signalized intersections to four-way stops. Perhaps the most ambitious was converting most of our one-way streets back to two-way. This undid efforts from the late 1950s through the 1960s, intended to relieve traffic congestion. As in most places where this had been undertaken, urban neighborhoods wound up paying the price in lost property value and increased danger, while suburbanites found they didn't really want to go downtown that much anyway.

Downtown on a rainy January day in 2013

Conversions came recommended by urbanists, based in part on the experience of cities like Savannah, Georgia, which saw a dramatic recovery along East Broad Street once it had been reconverted (Speck 2012: 179-180). Along with Jeff Speck, who consulted with the City of Cedar Rapids on urbanist projects throughout the decade, I quoted Seattle-based David Sucher, author of City Comforts: If one's goal is to move as many cars as possible through a neighborhood, the couplet [of one-way streets] works well. But if the goal is to create comfortable shopping districts, make streets two-way (2003: 86). If the impacts on commercial districts are bad, imagine what one-way streets do to residential neighborhoods, whose residents find themselves living on a speedway meant for others, on which they can only approach their homes from one direction.

3rd Avenue SE in the one-way era, July 2014

Ten years ago, the city stated the following goals for the initiative:

1. make the streets accessible and easier to navigate
2. improve opportunities to walk or bike
3. increase visibility of downtown businesses
4. slow traffic

I added my own measurable outcome--The conversion will be a success if it facilitates transformation of the city center into a 24-hour downtown, with a successful commercial enterprises, permanent residents and cultural attractions all contributing to a vibrant place--which seems in retrospect to be quite the high if desirable bar. I blame my hot-headed youth. It's safe to say that hasn't happened, nor have the three most prominent opposing views come to pass (traffic congestion, traffic crashes, mass confusion).

3rd Avenue SE conversion in process, October 2019

By this point, most of our one-way streets have been reconverted, the major exceptions being 15th and 16th Avenues SW, and 3rd and L Streets SW.  13th Street/College Drive/Oakland Road is still one-way between 2nd Avenue SW and H Avenue NE, and a few one-way blocks remain here and there on other streets as well, but our one-way street mileage today is a tiny percentage of what it was in 2010.

2nd Avenue SW is now two-way, L Street is still one-way
(Google Earth screenshot)

Measuring the impact of all these changes is tricky, partly because I have some but not very much data, and partly because there are other moving parts (many more bike lanes and sidewalks in town, construction projects necessitating extended closure of streets near the river, diminished use of offices post-COVID, closing of two blocks of 2nd Avenue SW for Physicians Clinic of Iowa, no discernable influx of population into the city) affecting the use of streets. So the assessments that follow are tentative.

My overall assessment is cautiously positive. I see no significant negative impacts at all, while positive changes to the affected blocks are less-than-revolutionary. Given that one-way streets are inherently confusing, I believe the first objective to be a slam dunk, but the others are subtle or require data I don't have.

Changes in daily traffic counts are interesting, but don't give us a lot to go on. The first round of reconversions, between 2015 and 2017, occurred on 2nd and 3rd Avenues SE/SW, 4th and 5th Avenues SE, and 7th and 8th Streets SE. On 7th and 8th--which remain one-way close to the Interstate entrance--traffic counts away from the Interstate remain roughly the same. On 2nd and 3rd, traffic counts have declined, but the biggest declines occurred well before the conversion, possibly due to changes in the downtown work/shopping scene. Also, 2nd Avenue SE no longer is continuous, since two blocks were closed early in the 2010s to make room for the new Physicians Clinic of Iowa campus. No data are available for 4th and 5th Avenues. (Profuse thanks to the Iowa Department of Transportation for sending along historic traffic count maps.)

Average Daily Traffic Counts, 3rd Avenue SE/SW

(some stretches have multiple readings)

YEAR 1500-1900e 1000-1500e 500-1000e 000-500e     BRIDGE 600w-000

1993                             8300

2005                         7900

2009 4390,6600 8400 6400         4250

2013 3750 4770,5900 4870 4910     4560         3490

2015 conversion from 6th St SW to 3rd St SE

2017 conversion from 5th Ave SW to 6th St SW

2017         3260,5700 4300 3220,2870    3450 2180

2018 conversion from 3rd St to 19th St SE

2021 3720 4370,6700

Speck argues that the most profound negative land use effects of one-way streets are found on the streets leading into downtown, "since most people do most of their shopping on the evening path home" (2012: 178). So we could look for changes on 2nd and 4th Avenues SE, 3rd Avenue SW, and on Center Point Road NE.

• All of the former one-way sections of these streets began in residential neighborhoods, typically with older single-family housing. Of the four streets, the neighborhood on 3rd Avenue is the most transformed, because it was most impacted by the flood. 2nd Avenue has seen a dramatic decrease in traffic because of the two block closure between 12th and 10th Streets, but there's been no new building in the mostly empty 1200 block.

  

  Start of the converted section, 1800 block of 2nd Ave SE

  
  
• Each street must pass through an empty quarter before it reaches downtown: 2nd and 4th Avenues go through the MedQuarter, Center Point Road becomes Coe Road between Coe College and St. Luke's Hospital, and 3rd Avenue passes underneath I-380. Such commercial development as there is on the far side of the empty quarter remains pretty much untouched.

  

  2nd Avenue enters the MedQuarter
  (PCI building is at the end of the block)

  
  
• Only at 3rd Street and below has 3rd Avenue seen a lot of investment as the Kingston Village area has emerged post-flood. 2nd Avenue has held its own close to downtown, with a mix of offices and restaurants, but a surprising amount of vacancies as well. 4th Avenue has seen very little change. Coe Road at this writing is still one-way below A Avenue NE.

Before the conversion: 200 block of 2nd Avenue SE,
August 2017 (Google Earth screenshot)

After the conversion: 200 block of 2nd Avenue SE,
May 2022 (Google Earth screenshot)

So, no dramatic change from the reconverted one-way streets, except for what's explainable by post-flood recovery, MedQuarter expansion, and post-pandemic declines in downtown office occupancy. Cedar Rapids, unlike, say, Providence or Charlotte, has not seen an influx of population that would force more transformation.

I still support the reconversions, for simplicity's sake, because it creates opportunity for future development, and for safety. A three-lane one-way street carrying 8400 cars through a residential neighborhood is not good for the quality of life of the people living there. A three-lane one-way street carrying half that many would be even less safe, because there would be more room for speeding.

ORIGINAL POST: "One Way or Two?" 22 September 2015

OTHER SOURCES: 

Jeff Speck, Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2012)

David Sucher, City Comforts; How to Build an Urban Village (City Comforts Inc., revised ed., 2003)