A Look Back: Cities take a ‘u-turn’ on one-way thinking

File Photo / Maureen Milliken Southbound cars on the newly two-way section of Water Street in downtown Augusta pass a vacant storefront. Studies show converting one-way downtown streets to two-way decreases vacancy rates.

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By Peter Van Allen

Back in 2019, a Mainebiz reporter took a closer look at central Maine cities that were turning downtown streets into two-way thoroughfares.

As reported in the Real Estate Insider of Aug. 22, 2019, “Inside what two-way downtown means for developers,” Augusta and Waterville were in the process of changing the traffic patterns.

One-way streets have long been a staple of major cities. In Maine, the one-way streets dated as far back as the 1940s. But the one-way traffic flow didn’t necessarily work for modern shoppers and shopkeepers.

Various parties interviewed by reporter Maureen Milliken hailed the change and said it would invigorate the downtowns.

A central Maine real estate broker, Hoa Hoang, didn’t need a study to tell her conversion to two-way would be good for development.

“I’m an advocate, I’ve always been one,” she told Mainebiz. “We’ll see values increase.”

In Augusta, Maureen wrote, the “downtown is less than half a mile long, hemmed in on one side by the Kennebec River and the other by a steep hill. The business district is a compact area, and Water Street is its only thoroughfare.”

“Switching to two-way is the single best way we can improve both visibility and access to downtown restaurants and retailers — now, and in the future,” a local official told Mainebiz.

Broker Hoang had recently sold a three-story commercial building at 166 Water St., just north of the area that was one-way, the Real Estate Insider reported.

In the past, she’d talked to buyers about property in the one-way area, but the response was often the same: “‘Oh it’s dead here,’ they’d tell me,” she told Mainebiz at the time. “And it was dead. So dead.”

Fun fact

John Gilderbloom, director of the Center for Sustainable Urban Neighborhoods at the University of Louisville, studied traffic flow and the effect of one-way streets. “While there is no magical quick fix when it comes to turning around neighborhoods, converting multi-lane one-way streets to two-way streets is a smart and affordable policy.”

Of a conversion in Louisville, he wrote: “Two-way conversion improves the livability of a neighborhood by significantly reducing crime and collisions and by increasing property values, business revenue, taxes, and bike and pedestrian traffic.”

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