Revenge of the Two-Way Street in Downtown Victoria - View Street
It has almost been four years since the last one-way street in Victoria was turned into a two-way street. That last change was a one block portion of Cormorant Street between Douglas and Blanshard. I wrote at the time that I was happy to see the change there and talked about the benefits of bi-directional traffic both for cars and for (more importantly) pedestrians.
Here we are four years later and we are seeing another street returning to bi-directional traffic. Unfortunately, it isn’t Yates, Fort, Pandora or Johnson. Instead it is the two half blocks of one way View Street from Broad Street to about half along to Blanshard Street. So now View Street is bi-directional along its entire length. I should be happy that we can chalk up another one, but this time I feel less enthusiastic and there are a couple of reasons.
First and perhaps most rose-coloured, View Street as it was before was almost devoid of traffic coming either east or west onto Douglas. For long-timed readers you may remember this idea from a few years ago about the opportunity that this low traffic presented at Douglas. The TLDR is that due to the low traffic at the ends of View Street at Douglas, why not just close it off and make it public space, essentially creating a focal point for downtown Victoria. Douglas Street has been in the news this week and it certainly seems like some people think it could use a shot in the arm. Returning to bi-directional traffic makes View Street back into a car thoroughfare and essentially removes this possibility from happening. Which leads into my second point and one that I think is more concrete for now.
One of the great benefits of View Street up till now and why it could have been a place to simply remove cars, was the extremely low volumes of traffic. In fact, traffic was so low that you pretty much didn’t have to think about cars there and could jaywalk it anywhere near Douglas Street. Even though the road has only been changed over for a few days, in my time walking around and taking pictures for this article the other day, I would say that there was double the amount of cars moving on it and now in both directions (Photos in the gallery above). Given time and enough driver muscle memory, this traffic volume will grow significantly from here. While I am sure that the Bay Centre is happy to have easier access to its parking garage, I am not entirely sure why this was worth the change.
So why has it changed, well I don’t know all the reasons why it was done. One for sure is due to the plans to pedestrianise Government Street. One of the biggest push backs against the changes to Government Street has been how it would limit access for the cruise ship passengers that use the Hop-on, Hop-off Bus that used to stop in front of Tractor on lower Government Street. The City wants the bus to use the new View Street access to deliver those cruise ship passengers to a new stop on Government north of View Street. Since the bus couldn’t manage to go down Broad and then access View, making it bi-directional solves that problem and it keeps the cruise ship passengers in the already built Government Street pedestrian space rather than the currently less pleasant parts north of Yates. Apart from this reason and the planning notion that bi-directional traffic is the way to go in downtown cores, I haven’t heard any other reasons and this Times Colonist article didn’t list any further ones either.
I still believe that converting one-way streets to bi-directional traffic is the way to go generally, but in this one instance, I think we have made a mistake and missed an opportunity to both keep a street quiet from cars and also the potential to make a great new public space for Victorians.
I know there are a lot of people out there that are loving this change and I would like to hear from them. If you know of some other reasons that the City did this, or you love it, let me know in the comments.
