Louisville Magazine

DEC 2015

Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.

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28 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 12.15 THE BIT WHY LOUISVILLE? 502poweryoga.com kyhumane.org Why so many one-way streets downtown? According to local historian/Metro Councilman Tom Owen, the wave of conversion from two-way to one-way streets started right after World War II, when many Louisvillians bought cars and started moving to the suburbs. "People who were advocates of the city center became frightened and began to want to design ways of moving traffc more readily through and across the older parts of Louisville," Owen says. In other words, city offcials wanted to keep people working and shopping downtown, so they looked for effcient ways to get to and from the core in the pre-interstate days. But not everyone was a fan of the one-way plan. "Where (the controversy) became most dramatic was on East Market Street," Owen says. "In meetings and protests, East Market business owners just threw themselves in front of the bulldozer." That's why Market Street switches from a one-way street to a two-way at Brook Street. According to Owen, business owners argued that potential customers would drive too fast down one-way streets and bypass them. Owen says the mayor at the time, Charles Farnsley, considered other one-way plans. "He proposed a rush hour one-waying on Bardstown Road coming in (to downtown) in the morning and going out in the evening on Cherokee Road," Owen says. "That plan just didn't get off the ground, there was so much neighborhood opposition." In recent years, a lot of cities, including Louisville, have converted some one-way streets back to two-way. (Brook and First streets became two-way streets in 2011.) Billy Riggs, a Louisville native who now teaches city and regional planning at California Polytechnic State University, has been tracking these changes in cities such as Minneapolis; Charleston, South Carolina; and Austin, Texas. He says transitioning to two-way streets can lead to an increase in cycling and business development and a decrease in automobile collisions. "There's a lot of reasons why in the 1950s they started (converting streets to one-way) — mainly because they thought that cars were the way of the future," Riggs says. "And I think that what we've found from the city-planning and urban-design realm is that really wasn't the best decision. It really compromised a lot of the things that made cities great." — Amy Talbott

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