J Magazine Winter 2019

The street between City Hall and the Oklahoma County Courthouse
wasn’t just six lanes wide. These were 12-foot-wide lanes,
the sort of dimension reserved for highways. And it was a one-way
street, though traffic volume, Speck noted, didn’t seem to support
Hudson being a one-way street or other corridor remaining oneway.
It was on this street that the photographer snapped a shot of
several people, including a woman in a wheelchair and children
darting through traffic trying to cross the six-lane, one-way Hudson
Avenue.
“The jaw dropper for me is the city’s traffic count map,” Speck
said. “If you walk the city, and you look at the streets, you would
think because of the size of the streets that traffic is two to three
times what is actually experienced. There is a shocking disconnect
between the size and speediness of all of your downtown streets
with a few rare exceptions.”
Oklahoma City was not initially designed to end up this way.
Oklahoma City is unlike any other city in America. A gunshot on
April 22, 1889, set up a famous land rush that hours later ended up
with creation of a city of 10,000.
City fathers then designed a street grid and pursued development
based on trolley lines that were built not just throughout the
young community but also to distant towns that decades later are
Oklahoma City suburbs.
The transformation of a city built on public transit to a sprawling
621 miles where cars were prioritized without question over
pedestrians can be traced back to a years-long effort to impose
one-way streets on downtown.
A Stanley Steamer bought by a local banker in 1903 was the
first car to hit city streets and just a dozen years later Henry Ford
was building a Model T assembly plant on the west side of downtown.
Vehicles quickly took over in Oklahoma City, as they did elsewhere.
By 1938, consultants and engineers were already pushing
for conversion of some key downtown streets to one-way traffic.
Business and property owners fought back and won. But the battle
wasn’t over.
The streetcars, succumbing to age and lack of investment, were
yanked off the streets in 1947. The out-of-state operators, who took
over the streetcars from the city fathers who started the operation,
switched to a bus fleet and insisted one-way streets were key to
making bus transit a successful replacement.
Protesters again argued one-way streets would increase confusion
and accidents and damage businesses.
THE OKLAHOMAN
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J MAGAZINE | WINTER 2019