Transportation planners across the United States have been reconverting one-way streets to two-way traffic flows, reversing a mid-20th-century redesign that prioritized suburban commuters over walkable downtowns. Indianapolis completed conversions on two major corridors last year and has budgeted an estimated $60 million for 10 additional projects, according to city officials. Louisville, Lynchburg, Virginia, Austin, Texas, and other cities are pursuing similar reversals, citing research showing one-way configurations create unpredictable hazards for pedestrians at shared intersections.
The trend reflects a decades-long reassessment of road design choices made when mass suburbanization placed vehicle speed ahead of urban walkability. Researchers say mixing one-way and two-way streets in city grids generates 16 distinct conflict sequences at intersections — a level of variability that pedestrians cannot reliably anticipate — and that the conversion costs, often funded in part by federal grants, are modest relative to the documented safety and economic benefits.
A street design reversal
Excessive speeding was so common on parallel one-way streets passing a massive electronics plant that Indianapolis residents used to refer to the pair as a “racetrack” akin to the city’s famous Motor Speedway a few miles west.
Michigan and New York streets were originally two-way thoroughfares that switched to opposite one-way routes in the 1970s to help thousands of RCA workers travel to and from their shifts building televisions or pressing vinyl records. After the RCA plant closed in 1995, the barren roads grew more enticing for lead-footed drivers — until city officials converted them back to two-way streets last year.
“The opening and conversion of those streets has just been transformative for how people think about that corridor,” said James Taylor, who runs a community center near the old RCA plant.
Indianapolis has 10 more conversions planned, at an estimated total cost of $60 million, approximately $25 million of which comes from a 2023 federal grant, said Mark St. John, chief engineer for the city’s Department of Public Works.
Why engineers consider one-way streets less safe
Dave Amos, an assistant professor of city and regional planning at California Polytechnic State University, said almost no major streets in the United States originated as one-way routes — two-way streets were the standard before mass migration to the suburbs prioritized faster commutes over downtown walkability.
“One-way streets are designed for moving cars quickly and efficiently,” Amos said. “So when you have that as your goal, pedestrians and cyclists almost by design are secondary, which makes them more vulnerable.”
The hazard extends beyond speeding. Wade Walker, an engineer with Kittelson & Associates who has worked on conversion projects in Lakeland, Florida; Lynchburg, Virginia; and Chattanooga, Tennessee, said there is a misperception that one-way streets are safer for pedestrians because walkers need only look one direction for incoming traffic.
Pedestrians crossing a signalized intersection of two-way streets encounter vehicles in a predictable sequence: those turning left on green, traveling straight, and turning right on red. When one-way streets combine with two-way streets in a city grid, there are 16 potential sequences depending on the type and direction of the roads that intersect, Walker said.
“It’s not the number of conflicts, it’s the way those conflicts occur,” he said.
Neighborhood equity in Louisville
Louisville, Kentucky, about two hours south of Indianapolis, has been restoring one-way streets to their original two-way footprints. The state is leading an ongoing project to reconvert a stretch along Main Street that passes the Louisville Slugger Museum, the KFC Yum! Center arena, and a minor-league baseball stadium.
The city’s largest redesign is planned for 2026 in the predominantly Black western part of Louisville, where many roads changed to one-way routes in the 1970s to feed a new interstate bridge over the Ohio River. Michael King, the city’s assistant director of transportation planning, said the one-way conversion decimated neighborhoods and cut off the once-thriving community from downtown.
“All those mom-and-pop shops and local businesses over time kind of faded because that connectivity got taken away,” King said. “It just feels more like, ‘This is a road to get me through here pretty quickly.’”
Skeptics converted elsewhere
In Chattanooga, Tennessee, business vacancies skyrocketed within three years after some two-way streets were transformed into unidirectional ones, and the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga became “landlocked” to prevent students from having to cross a dangerous road, Walker said. When he returned in 2022, nearly two decades after the road was redesigned, the college campus had expanded across the former barrier and business construction had surged.
Lynchburg, Virginia, completed a two-way conversion of its downtown Main Street in 2021. Rodney Taylor, a restaurant owner near the project, had voiced concerns before construction that the redesign would block delivery vehicles. After the city finished the work, he said his fears proved unfounded.
“An important thing to do is to admit when you’re wrong,” Taylor said. “And I was just flat-out wrong.”
Austin, Texas, has seen similar outcomes after the city began reconverting some of the one-way streets in its urban core. Adam Greenfield, executive director of Safe Streets Austin, said residents who initially resisted quickly changed their views.
“It just worked,” said Greenfield, who is lobbying the city to convert all its remaining one-way streets. “That’s what you’ll find with these conversions — they’ll be done and then instantly people will be like, ‘Why didn’t we do this 20 years ago?’”
Chicago moves in the other direction
Not every city is pursuing two-way conversions. Chicago changed some two-way streets to one-way last year in the busy West Loop restaurant district. Alderman Bill Conway, who represents an adjacent area, said he received numerous calls from confused constituents.
“Even if this was the right move to make these streets one-way, it certainly doesn’t make sense to not ask the opinion of the neighbors,” Conway said.
What comes next in Indianapolis
James Taylor, who runs the community center near the old RCA plant, said it is too early to measure the full impact of Indianapolis’s completed conversions. Some business owners have signaled construction plans along the redesigned streets, he said, though the corridors still feel unfamiliar after three decades of one-way traffic.
“I’ve been driving around that neighborhood for 30 years,” he said. “It’s all kind of familiar, but you’re coming at it from a whole different perspective.”