The end of the road for one-way streets Stephen Bay ley The Times

"It is the end of the road for the detested one-way street," says
Stephen Bayley. Transport for London, "perhaps the biggest
manager of one-way systems in the world", has acknowledged
that they simply don't work. So now Tottenham Court Road, Pall
Mall and Piccadilly, among many other streets, arc to be returned
to two-way traffic. And not before time. The modern theology of
traffic management, which spawned our one-way streets, dates
back to 1963, when Colin Buchanan, a town planner, published
the "ruinously influential" report Traffic in Towns. Buchanan was
obsessed with separating motorists from pedestrians through the
use of flyovers, clearways and gyratory systems. "Towns were to
be cleansed of intimacy, hazard and surprise", and a "spurious
logic" was imposed on human behaviour. But since real people
don't think like that, one-way systems proved confusing and made
congestion worse. "Best to reinstate the Darwinian struggle of the
two-way street and re-create cities that respond to the cheerful
anarchy of individual purpose, not the chilly master plan."