Berkeley Diary
Masaki YAMAOKA
Jun/15/2005 My Findings of
Word
Lag(6) One-Way VS. Ippo Tsuko
In the first week that I came
to Berkeley from
Japan, I stayed in the Hotel Durant located along Durant
Avenue. This street is very wide with five lanes. Both sides of the
street are
used as parking areas, and cars run on the three center lanes. It was a
strange scene
for me, because all the cars ran in the same direction. I could see a
road sign. Looking from the hotel, it indicated with a right-ward
pointing arrow and a phrase
that the street, though it has five lanes, is
"ONE WAY." This street is eastbound.
The next street north is Bancroft Way, also a one-way
street with four lanes.
However, this street is westbound. Likewise, parallel to Bancroft and
further south of the campus, Haste Street is westbound and
Dwight Way is eastbound. The Downtown Berkeley grid is the same as that
of my hometown Kyoto City.
In Japan, there are also many one-way
streets.
We call them "ippo tsuko" (=one direction passage) in Japanese. But
most one-way streets in Japan are narrow with only one lane. In my
town, Hachioji, there are many narrow streets. Most of them are
one-way. Because Hachioji is lacated in a hilly region, the streets are
narrow
and bent. When driving, we have to take care which streets are
one-way. Otherwise, we will end up going in the wrong direction against
our will.
In Downtown Berkeley, Durant Avenue,
Bancroft Way, and other streets are wide and straight. I didn't know
the reason
why they are one-way. Recently I found a website which explains the
reason why the nation created one-way streets in downtown. Acording to
the website, the target is safety and rationality based on city
planning as follows (summary):
One-way streets have the advantage that
pedestrians and
drivers
need only look one way when watching for traffic. And one-way streets
also permit higher average speeds because signals on
a one-way grid can be synchronized to allow drivers in all directions
to proceed indefinitely at a fixed rate of speed. A semblance of
synchronization can be approached on a two-way grid only if signals are
more than a half-mile apart, and even then it is less than perfect.
Traffic on two-way streets, for example, is often delayed by special
left-turn signals, which aren't needed on one-way grids. Faster speeds
on signal-synchronized one-way streets increased road
capacities without laying more pavement. Since the increase is in the
average rate of speed, not the top speed, increased speeds pose no
loss in safety. One-way streets not only have greater capacity than
two-way streets, they save the space that two-way streets require for
left-turn lanes.
I think the word "one-way"
is very simple and convenient. It is easier to recognize on the road
for citizens than the Japanese term "ippo tsuko." Japanese people often
say
"ittsu" in abbreviation. The word is convenient, but informal. In
English, we call ordinary two-direction streets "two-way." But in
Japanese we don't say "niho tsuko." I think the phrase "ippo tsuko" is
inconvenient.