If you live anywhere near the eastern edge of Windsor Square, you already know the rhythm of 7th Street without thinking about it. Southbound gets the middle lane from 6 to 9 in the morning. Northbound gets it back from 4 to 6 in the afternoon. You learn where you can turn left and where you can't, and you stop noticing the overhead signs the way you stop noticing a ceiling fan.
The city of Phoenix is asking residents to notice again. A four-phase traffic study now underway covers the exact stretch that forms Windsor Square's front door, and the headlines around it make it sound like a referendum on whether the lanes survive at all. They don't say that. What the city has actually put on the table this year is a narrower and more useful question: not whether to keep the lanes, but which of the fixes it already identified five years ago finally get built.
A Lane Older Than Most Mortgages on the Block
The reversible lane on 7th Avenue has been running since 1979. The one on 7th Street, the boundary that separates Windsor Square from the rest of Midtown, has been running since 1982. Both were built the same way city engineers solved traffic problems everywhere in that era: borrow a lane from the light direction and hand it to the heavy one, twice a day, and post enough signage that drivers figure out the schedule.
Forty-plus years later, that schedule hasn't changed. Left turns are still blocked at every signalized intersection during peak hours on both streets, though you can still turn left at driveways and unsignalized cross streets. What has changed is how loudly people are asking the city to reconsider the whole arrangement, and that pressure is what actually put this year's study on the calendar.
The Petition That Didn't Get What It Asked For
In 2025, a resident-led petition asking the city council to remove the reverse lanes entirely reached the council with more than 4,000 signatures attached, and by the time the city's follow-up study got underway this spring, organizers said that number had climbed past 5,000. The council did not grant the request. Instead, in a unanimous vote, members directed the Street Transportation Department to conduct a comprehensive study covering the whole corridor, not just the lanes themselves, from 19th Avenue to 16th Street and from McDowell Road north to Dunlap Avenue. That boundary runs the full length of Windsor Square's 7th Street frontage.
That vote is the reason this spring's public meeting happened at all. It is also why the study's scope is broader than the petition that triggered it. The council didn't ask staff to decide whether the lanes stay. It asked staff to model the whole area, transit, bikes, growth projections, safety, and let the reverse lanes fall out as one variable among several.
Two Studies, Two Very Different Numbers
Here's where the debate gets more interesting than a simple keep-it or kill-it framing suggests. The city's own 2021 engineering study, the one still shaping staff's thinking, concluded that removing the reversible lanes would increase travel times by more than 40 percent in some segments and push several intersections into an unacceptable level of service. That study didn't recommend doing nothing. It recommended a specific set of upgrades: replacing the aging static signage with dynamic lane control, adding fiber trunk lines to run smarter signals, restriping the corridor, and building bus bays so transit doesn't get stuck in the reversing lane. None of that was ever built. No funding was identified and no project timeline was set, according to the city's own project page.
Meanwhile, opponents of the lanes point to a different number. Advocacy group Urban Phoenix Project has cited a 2024 ASU analysis finding the reverse lanes see usage as low as 6 percent in some segments during peak periods, alongside a separate claim from the transit-focused group Strong Towns PHX that the corridors carry roughly twice the crash rate of comparable arterials. The city hasn't published a rebuttal to those specific figures, and neither side's numbers have been tested against each other in this year's study yet. That's precisely the gap the current four-phase process is supposed to close, by building traffic models that test several scenarios rather than relying on data that's now five years old on one side and advocacy-sourced on the other.
What a Mile West Looks Like Right Now
The clearest preview of what any of this means in daily life isn't happening on 7th Street. It's happening a mile west, along 7th Avenue through the Melrose District, where the same reverse-lane mechanics have been running since 1979 and where business owners have been the loudest voices in this year's public process.
"7th Avenue and 7th Street are highways. I've been around a long time. People don't read signs. It ain't going to make a difference. You've got to put other things in place, like medians and trees, visual things that will get the traffic slowed."
That's Mark Howard, who owns The Royale on 7th Avenue, describing what daily traffic feels like to a business owner on the reverse-lane corridor. A few doors down, Be Nice Bike Shop co-owner Mischa O'Reilly told local reporters he'd love to see traffic calming that makes the strip walkable and bikeable, and Copper Star Coffee owner Bill Sandweg has said he's watched a couple dozen of his customers get into accidents along the corridor over the past two decades. None of those quotes are about Windsor Square's side of the study area specifically, but they describe the exact lane system, on the exact same schedule, under the exact same council directive, that runs along your neighborhood's own boundary. Whatever gets decided for 7th Avenue's version of this problem will very likely set the template for 7th Street's.
What Comes Back This Fall
The study is currently past its first phase, corridor analysis, which wrapped alongside the May 7 virtual public meeting and a community survey that closed May 29. City staff have said stakeholder outreach continues through the summer, with in-person and virtual public meetings scheduled for this fall, meaning sometime in the weeks ahead. A final recommendation goes to the city council's Transportation, Infrastructure and Planning Subcommittee by winter 2026.
If you missed the spring survey, the fall meetings are the next real chance to weigh in before staff lock in a recommendation. Consultant WSP, leading the technical work through project manager Scott Beck, has said the next phase involves building traffic models and testing different scenarios, which is the part of the process where those competing 40-percent and 6-percent numbers finally get put in the same room together.
The Question Worth Watching
The framing you'll see in most headlines between now and winter is going to be "will Phoenix keep the reverse lanes." That's not really what's being decided. The council already answered that question in 2025 by ordering a study instead of a removal. The actual question, the one that determines whether 7th Street feels any different to drive or walk along a year from now, is whether the city finally funds the fixes its own 2021 study proposed, dynamic signals, bus bays, restriping, five years after they were written down and never built. Watch the fall meetings for that answer, not for a vote on the lanes themselves.
For a neighborhood defined as much by its curving side streets as by its edges, that's the kind of detail worth knowing before it becomes next year's news instead of this fall's. If you want a neighbor's read on what's happening around Windsor Square, or anywhere else in North Central Phoenix, the team at The Caniglia Group is always glad to talk it through. Schedule a Free Consultation whenever you're ready.
