We look back to 2019, when Mainebiz reported on two cities that put the brakes on one-way street patterns in their downtowns.
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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.”
