One Kamloops City Councillor would like to see the city put two way traffic back on at least a couple of downtown streets.

Denis Walsh believes one way streets discourages walking in the area. “What I see, is if you had a clean slate, you’d never design a city as it is, slicing and dicing it with these one ways that are not really bringing traffic into our downtown core necessarily. I’d say 60%-70% of that traffic is travelling straight through. It creates noise. It’s dirty. People don’t tend to walk on those two streets, Lansdowne and Seymour especially.”

“Even if you just did 2nd to 6th Street on Seymour, because we’re talking about perhaps having a community arts centre down and it’s going to bring a lot more pedestrian traffic. We have nowhere to grow our downtown. We’ve gone almost as far as we can out towards Valleyview. So, it would open up our downtown.”

Walsh says with talk of a new Arts Centre coming to the area, it would be a way to increase the walkability downtown. “Cincinnati is an example. When they did a conversion from two to one, 40% of the businesses went broke. People don’t walk on one way streets and so it doesn’t lend itself to retail. So you have to skip over that one and start again. So for a vibrant downtown we need to do something with the traffic and the speed of the traffic.”

Walsh the downtown plan will likely be presented to council in October or November.