Collinsville IL Still Has One-Way Streets
Yesterday I was briefly in downtown Collinsville IL. Â I’d forgotten how nice their Main Street looks. Â I last wrote about their Main Street in July 2007 when it looked like they may undo what never should have been done: Collinsville IL May Finally Correct One-Way Main Street Mistake. Â Unfortunately, Collinsville still has a one-way couplet — Main St eastbound and Clay St westbound.
Does the direction of auto traffic matter to pedestrians? Â Yes! Â On the sidewalk you feel like you are next to an escape route. Decades ago traffic engineers convinced nearly every town, big & small, to install one-way streets to move traffic faster. Â One-way streets in a small town make little sense but undoing what has been in place for so long is nearly impossible.
It is a shame too, Main St in Collinsville has very charming buildings and a decent streetscape. Changing Main & Clay to be two-way again would have huge benefits. Â The vibe would instantly be different.
– Steve Patterson
In the hierarchy of balancing moving cars and preserving urbanity, I place the one-way couplet in the middle, with the bypass being much, much worse. When you do a couplet, at least you can maintain on-street parking and eyes on storefronts. Collinsville, like many other towns, could've elected to make Main Street 4 lanes by eliminating on-street parking, which would've been more devastating. While I agree that making Main Street two-way with one lane each way and on-street parking would improve the charm and the vibe of downtown, I don't know, and I doubt that you do, either, the larger vehicular movement challenges. Traffic is like water – it follows the path of least resistance. If it's not on Main and Clay, it's gonna end up somewhere else, and in a town like Collinsville, that could easily be a residential street.
The bypass did accelerate moving to the edge but it also left the downtown alone by moving high volumes of traffic somewhere besides Main St. A street grid is supposed to spread the traffic out rather than bunch it all up in a couple of streets.
“Changing Main & Clay to be two-way again would have huge benefits.” And what would those benefits be?