A desired feature of a city is
its walkability — the ability to get where you need to go from
home on foot, whether that’s shops and restaurants, grocery
stores, or doctor’s offices and pharmacies. Sacramento has
several neighborhoods with high walkability scores, including
Midtown, downtown, Curtis Park and Hollywood Park, but it also
has another factor that doesn’t make walking all that appealing:
one of the highest pedestrian death rates in the state.

Our streets are flat, with no big
hills to navigate like San Francisco, and they offer plenty of
room to walk. But we also have many one-way streets, which
encourage cars and buses to drive faster, says Jeff Speck, an
author and city planner from Boston who spoke at the Downtown
Sacramento Partnership’s annual State of Downtown breakfast
meeting in February.

People walk through the Downtown Commons area in Sacramento.
(Shutterstock photo)

“If you look statistically, you
need to worry much more about cars than you do about crime,” says
Speck, author of “Walkable
City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a
Time.”

There’s been a 78 percent
increase in pedestrian deaths over the past 15 years in the U.S.
A 2024 national report from
Smart Growth
showed there were 377 pedestrian
deaths in the Sacramento-Folsom-Roseville area over a five-year
period, making it the fifth deadliest metropolitan area in the
state (after Bakersfield, Fresno, Stockton and Riverside-San
Bernardino-Ontario) and the 20th in the country. “This is a
mandate for dramatic change,” he said during his talk.

A lot of this was created decades
ago by city planners who redesigned streets to be one-way because
they thought it would improve traffic flow. But Speck said
vehicles actually go faster on one-way streets, leading to more
pedestrians getting hit.

He used a real-life example:
While staying at the Citizen Hotel during his visit, Speck
watched out his window as both cars and buses sped by at 35 mph
or higher on I Street, which is one-way. “It was interesting to
see speeds that you simply would not see on a two-lane, two-way
street,” he said. And the consequences are harsh. “A car going 35
mph is seven times more likely to kill you than a car going 25
mph.”

Sacramento’s Citizen Hotel overlooks a one-way street.
(Shutterstock photo)

Speck’s suggestion, which has
been used successfully in other cities such as Oklahoma City and
Louisville, Kentucky, is to convert one-way streets into two-way
streets. He said after Louisville reverted some streets back to
two-way, pedestrian crashes dropped 48 percent.

Speck also suggested eliminating
some traffic signals. While the signals are supposed to improve
the flow of traffic, Speck’s research says it actually makes
traffic less efficient. A typical signal stop lasts one to two
minutes, which can actually be longer because it takes time for
traffic to start flowing again after making a complete stop.
Meanwhile, a pause at a stop sign is usually just two to three
seconds. Speck said traffic flows more smoothly when more stop
signs are used. “We are vastly oversignaled in the U.S.,” he
said.

Oklahoma City has recently invested in walkability initiatives
such as converting some streets back to two-way. (Shutterstock
photo)

Another example he cited in favor
of more stop signs is that cars speed up to beat a red light,
meaning they are traveling even faster than 35 mph, but if you
accidentally fail to make a complete stop at a stop sign, you’re
only traveling about 5 mph. When traffic signals were changed to
stop signs in other cities, drivers initially rebelled until they
realized they were actually getting to work faster without the
signals.

“That’s the great secret of
replacing signals with stop signs, is that you don’t sit and wait
at the light. You go slow, you pause. You go slow, you pause.
It’s just a much more walkable, healthy downtown,” Speck said in
a later interview.

He said I and J streets, which
are both one-way, see about 10,000 cars a day. Speck advocates
for restriping, not rebuilding, city streets, which is more cost
effective. It’s also good for merchants, who see their businesses
double in activity when one-way streets are converted to two-way
streets.

Sacramento’s J Street is one-way and sees more than 10,000 cars a
day. (Shutterstock photo)

Speck said urban planners drove
people out of the city decades ago when they created highways to
take them to suburbs. (The suburbanization of America also led to
more de facto segregation, as Black families remained in city
centers due to a lack of access to home financing.) But downtowns
remain valuable assets to a region.

“The downtown is the only part of
the city that belongs to everybody,” Speck said. “Walkability is
the central feature of what makes downtowns thrive.”

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