Greene Street will become a two-way street in 2020 according to Zack Matheny, president of Downtown Greensboro Inc. (DGI).
Although this may not sound like much, it is a project Matheny and others have been working on for over a decade.
In fact, Matheny has been promising that all the pieces had fallen into place for Greene Street to become two way for longer than he has been president of DGI. Matheny was hard at work on the project back when he was Greensboro city councilmember.
It’s what most people call a no brainer, but for some reason the many Greensboro city councils that have served over the years have not been able to make it happen.
It isn’t for lack of trying. In his last year as mayor in 2007, Keith Holliday said that one of his goals before he left office was to finally get Greene Street changed to a two-way street. Perhaps the traffic circle at the south end of Greene Street was named for Holliday as a conciliation prize.
According to Matheny, 13 years after Holliday set it as a goal, the traffic pattern on the street is finally going to change.
At present, North Greene Street north of Bellemeade Street is two way and South Greene Street south of Washington Street is two way, but the four blocks between Bellemeade and Washington are one way going south. Not only is this nonsensical, it also causes traffic accidents when drivers unfamiliar with the bizarre traffic pattern don’t notice that suddenly, without doing anything but driving straight ahead, they are going the wrong way down a one-way street.
It may not seem like much to people who don’t live or work downtown, but to those who do, going around Greene Street is often a daily annoyance. One of the many benefits to making Greene Street a two-way street is that it will take a lot of traffic off Commerce Place and Sternberger Place, which as their names imply were not designed as thoroughfares.
