RULE 38 & 40 | REVERT MULTILANE ONE-WAYS TO TWO-WAYS FOR BUSINESS & CONVENIENCE

WALKABLE WICHITA: LESSONS FROM JEFF SPECK

BY RAMI STUCKY

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On Tuesday, November 13, 1951, A. Owen Holiday, owner of a blueprint copying and engineer supply office on North Topeka, filed a petition before the city commissioners. The reason? Commissioners were planning to make Topeka and Market one-way. Holiday objected.^[1]

Urban planner Jeff Speck helps explain why. In Walkability City Rules: 101 Steps to Making Better Places, Speck notes how one-way streets are not good for business. A coffee shop located on an inbound one-way street might be great for downtown commuters. However, a bar or restaurant would fare poorly. Shops whose facades face the flow of traffic are often overlooked by drivers.^[2]

Many Wichitans in the 1950s echoed Holiday’s concerns and feared the impact of one-way conversion on their business. Around the same time city commissioners were proposing to turn Topeka and Market one way, they also proposed conversion of Broadway. In response, 3,000 merchants along the street went on record opposing the conversion.^[3] In addition, 300 businesspeople and residents signed and submitted a petition to the city commissioners in protest.^[4] Thanks to their efforts, the street has remained two-way.

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Residents and business owners were not as successful downtown. Some were lukewarm about converting Topeka and Market to begin with. The Wichita Independent Business Men’s Association voted 101 to 70 in favor of some conversions but 69 to 34 against an entire system of one-ways. ^[5] Other Wichita merchants were more vocal, though, feeling that one-ways would be a “deterrent to trade.”^[6] Members of the Wichita Chamber of Commerce mostly disapproved of the plan to create one-way streets downtown.^[7] B.L. Allis, proprietor of the Allis Hotel, argued that it took 24 minutes to move a vehicle from his hotel to Knightley’s garage whereas the return trip could be made in just five minutes.^[8]

The City of Wichita is currently in the process of reverting Topeka, Main, Market, Emporia, and English to two-ways. However, for decades they, in addition to Saint Francis and Williams, operated as one-way. During that time, 13 percent of downtowns’ façades faced the direction of one-way traffic. Quantitatively, that is not much. However, previously, trying to get to a restaurant on 320 S Market had been somewhat confusing. The restaurant’s entrance faces north, meaning that despite its address, drivers on Market, a northbound one-way, never saw the front door. Current conversions back to two-way streets will alleviate this issue. 

The City can cite the success of Saint Francis’ conversion in 2011 back to a two-lane road as beneficial for business. "What we immediately saw happen, I mean, that two-block stretch, there was only a handful of viable businesses. The rest of those properties were boarded up and vacant," Jason Gregory, then executive vice president of Downtown Wichita said. "I want to say within a year, year and a half, we went from boarded up and vacant to almost 100% occupied in that time period. So, it did spur that private sector to step in."^[9] Many of those businesses Gregory cited, among them Cocoa Dolce, Nortons Brewing, Bite Me BBQ, and Zelman Lofts are still there a decade and a half later.

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[1] “One-Way Street Protests Heard,” Wichita Beacon, November 13, 1951, 1.

[2] Jeff Speck, Walkable City Rules: 101 Steps to Making Better Places (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2018), 91.

[3] “Two One-Way Streets O.K.’d,” Wichita Eagle, September 5, 1951, 5.

[4] “Protest 1-Way on Broadway,” Wichita Beacon, May 15, 1951, 5.

[5] “Favor Downtown One-Way Streets,” Wichita Eagle, September 4, 1951, 5.

[6] “One-Way Streets Again on Agenda,” Wichita Eagle, November 2, 1951, 21.

[7] “Opposes Traffic Pattern Change,” Wichita Eagle, June 27, 1951, 3.

[8] “One-Way Street System Studied,” Wichita Beacon, September 3, 1952, 5.

[9] Shelby Kellerman, “How Converting a Downtown Wichita Street from One-Way to Two-Way Can Spur Development,” Wichita Business Journal, August 5, 2020, https://www.bizjournals.com/wichita/news/2020/08/05/emporia-street-downtown-wichita-two-way-street.html.