Cities' new direction: Away from one-ways

Slowly, St. Petersburg is joining the drive to restore two-way traffic on downtown streets.

By BRYAN GILMER, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published January 18, 2002

ST. PETERSBURG -- From the 1960s through 1981, St. Petersburg spent tens of thousands of dollars to make the downtown street system almost completely one-way. It happened one or two streets at a time according to a master plan.

"It was like the dessert of the week," former Mayor Randy Wedding recalls. "It was the national traffic planning idiom of the time."

Now the city seems on the verge of the latest street configuration trend -- to start undoing those changes.

On Thursday, the St. Petersburg City Council approved switching two minor, residential one-way avenues to two-way operation. Eighth Avenue N, now all eastbound, will become two-way east of Fourth Street, and Ninth Avenue N, all westbound, will become two-way east of Third Street.

The council authorized its first major switch last year. It agreed to convert 20 blocks of a pair of crucial north-south thoroughfares, Eighth and Dr. M.L. King (Ninth) streets, to two-way operation. Engineers are now designing the conversion.

Other area cities are having similar discussions.

Last year, Brooksville talked of switching two of its major streets back to two-way operation. It gave up because the roads are under Florida Department of Transportation control, and it found the state agency's restrictions too burdensome.

But Lakeland reports great success with switching back several downtown streets, and partly based on that feedback, Tampa is planning to hold a City Council workshop soon to talk about which downtown streets there might work better two-way.

St. Petersburg's council will approve each additional change one by one, but city engineer Mike Connors and his staff studied the entire downtown. A few one-way streets should be left alone, they found, including the popular and heavily traveled First avenues N and S, which connect western St. Petersburg with downtown.

But many one-way pairs could be two-wayed immediately, and others might be converted later, the study found.

"Part of our prioritization is keeping in mind ease of conversion when you consider cost," Connors said.

Minor neighborhood avenues like the ones the council switched Thursday are easy and cheap; the pair will cost an estimated $10,000, and crews will add a few stop signs, repaint lines on the street and eliminate a few parking spaces near intersections. The money is to come out of a fund set aside for traffic management by a new Fourth Street N drug store.

But major thoroughfares have a lot of expensive traffic signals, which often need new poles, so such streets cost about $143,000 per intersection. The cost is estimated at $2-million to convert King Street alone.

First and Second streets near the new BayWalk development downtown fall into that category, though they are on the list of first priorities because they would improve circulation and make that section of the downtown business district more friendly to pedestrians.

"We've got more people walking downtown now than we've had in probably 30 years," Connors said.

The main reason to have one-way streets is to handle heavy traffic -- which never materialized in St. Petersburg. Even at their busiest times, most of the city's streets if two-wayed could handle several times as many cars as use them, Connors found.

So businesses began to complain about the streets' drawbacks: they confuse visitors, speed traffic, intimidate pedestrians and sometimes require you to drive blocks to reach something that should require just a simple turn.

"One-way streets are a 1970s traffic engineer's approach to getting traffic out of downtown," said Donald A. Shea, executive vice president of the St. Petersburg Downtown Partnership, a business coalition. "Well, it worked. And some of it has never come back."

The need to keep the higher capacity of one-way streets may be a bigger issue in Tampa, according to Tampa transportation manager Elton Smith.

"A great deal of the traffic which arrives at the Ice Palace and the Marriott convention hotel comes from (Interstate 275), which is maybe 10 blocks from there through the middle of downtown Tampa," Smith noted.

Tampa blocks are shorter than St. Petersburg's, and the streets are narrower, so Smith plans to warn Tampa council members that altering the wrong streets could back up a line of cars from one traffic light to the one behind it, causing serious congestion.

Connors said he is "absolutely" confident that the streets he has suggested switching would not bring gridlock to St. Petersburg.

Even though one of the reasons St. Petersburg one-wayed its streets in the first place was to slide itself into the same big-city category as Tampa, some residents here have long drawn the contrast.

When one-waying was first proposed in St. Petersburg in 1959, Times reader F.L. Thomsen wrote to the editor that it was a bad idea, and he related a frustrating trip to Tampa he'd just made as proof.

"In order to pick up passengers at a hotel, it was necessary to make a round trip of nine blocks, in order to reach a point only two blocks distant," he said. "If you want to see what one-way traffic can do in confusing out-of-town guests, just try to get around Tampa."

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