Director's Take

Transportation Network Matters

05-26-2025

Dear Friend of Downtown,

How you get around your downtown and the experience you have while doing it has everything to do with your feelings of usefulness, comfort, safety, and level of interest. And if your downtown streetscape doesn’t offer those four reasons for walking around, according to city planner Jeff Speck, people will not do it.

Louisville was lucky enough to hire Jeff Speck and Stantec to review the Downtown and NuLu transportation network, looking at traffic flow, sidewalk widths, walkability, and other amenities. And of course, we want people to continue to come back to Downtown and willingly walk around, so we listened!

The recommendations focus mostly on changing almost every street back to two-way traffic flow. This is a huge reverse of the decisions made in the 1950s when the old grid was made one way to make getting in and out of downtown as easy and as fast as possible.

Hooray! And until we see this is work underway, probably next spring, work has begun on the transformation of River Road between 3rd and 7th streets, reducing a lane to make the River Walk bigger and more bike and walker friendly along the Ohio River.

Details matter, and these are big ones. These changes will make it so much nicer to walk around, see your friends, and visit our street-level retailers and restaurateurs. Win win win!

See you on the streets soon!