
At a time when many roads in the city of Santa Barbara have become perpetual construction projects — much to the chagrin and anger of motorists hoping to get from Point A to B — lemon-clad workers -yellow construction vests were sent by City Hall to eight- block the downtown stretch of State Street to remove any traces of the bright-green road paint designed to guide cyclists to the center of the street. Instead of the bright green – poorly compared to the color of the miniature golf courses when it was first installed a year and a half ago – the street crew is busy scraping the epidermis of the paint from both sides at the affected intersections, raking the concrete, and then placing large rectangles of heavily scented, freshly baked slurry seal in its place. In other words, it is the equivalent of a massive skin grafting operation at intersections from Victoria to Cota streets – an operation, it was revealed on Friday, aimed at clearing the way for a “living experiment” to find a better way for cyclists and pedestrians to safely coexist on the State Street promenade.
The timing, suddenness, and chaos of this effort left many passers-by scratching their heads and fueled much speculation and suspicion, especially among the cyclists and their advocates – for whom the green paint installed after the construction of the State Street promenade due to the COVID pandemic.
“There are some people who think this is part of a broader conspiracy by Mayor Randy Rowse to put cars back on State Street,” said Councilman Michael Jordan. “That’s 100 percent and clearly wrong.” (Mayor Rowse is known to have an interest in putting cars back a few blocks on the promenade, an experiment in urban engineering in which he is famously cool.)
Jordan is one of three council members who sit on an ad hoc subcommittee (the name of which he cannot correct) designed to address the interim needs of State Street and the promenade until a long-term master plan will finally be hashed out. a few years from now. The other two council members of the ad hoc interim committee, as it is known, are Kristen Sneddon and Oscar Gutierrez. They meet behind closed doors where the public is not allowed to attend without pre-prepared agendas or minutes given after the fact. According to the law, all the usual rules of open-government do not apply to ad hoc committees, which may be the reason for their growing popularity.

Jordan said the green paint sprayed by the operation at the intersections of the promenade has been “fairly successful” in keeping bicyclists on State Street into the middle of the street. It was a complete failure, however, he said in managing pedestrians. With so many pedestrians and bicyclists now sharing State Street’s new vehicle-free environment, Jordan said, serious safety concerns need to be addressed. Adding urgency to this equation is the recent surge in popularity of electric bikes, many of which can reach a top speed of 28 miles per hour.
“No one thought of it,” Jordan said. “There is no clear solution. But it must be done. We are bombarded with complaints. Someone could get hurt.”
Starting in early November, he said, City Hall will begin treating the State Street promenade as a giant “living experiment” where different methods of solving the problem will be tested in real time based on the number and proximity of number of parklets and pedestrians. . In the meantime, he said, the city police will begin enforcing the vehicle code – or some variant of it – to ensure that cyclists do not run red lights and stop signs with impunity and the pedestrians are not at risk.
To the extent that reliable statistics exist about the number of accidents and collisions involving cyclists and pedestrians on the promenade, Jordan does not pretend to know them. As a matter of political truth – impressionistic and anecdotal nonetheless – the level of anxiety, hatred, and outright anger directed at young people riding e-bikes has been extreme.
In a meeting of the ad hoc interim committee that took place this Friday morning, the staff of the city of Jordan revealed that during the summer weekends, the promenade will receive 7,000 visitors per day or weekdays and 12,000 visitors per day on the weekend. The number of cyclists tabulated during that time on weekdays is 2,000 and 2,400 on weekends. Of the bikes, 20 percent were clocked faster than 15 mph. Two percent were clocked traveling 20 mph or faster.
Aside from police officers not wanting to enforce this type of alt transit rodeo, they may lack the legal tools. When cars were banned on State Street, Jordan said, questions arose as to how legal the use of the vehicle code was. He said that the City Attorney’s Office will hash that with the city police to create an enforceable template of rules for the new promenade road.
Jordan acknowledged that he has heard many complaints that the town’s usual public process is being bypassed. He pointed out that the “living experiment” model proposed by Brian Bosse, who now runs the downtown parking department, should be quick and agile and that the city’s traditional process is too difficult. (Bosse, in a previous incarnation, was the staff charged with citing, authorizing, and developing the first — and only — public restroom on State Street.)
“We need staff to be proactive, imaginative, innovative, experimental, and practical,” Jordan said.

That approach has critics among many traditional stakeholders in the urban process. Many prominent members of the various advisory committees expressed frustration that they were kept in the dark about the changes in the plans until the last minute. But to a remarkable degree, in the past two years, City Hall has reinvented State Street with relative ease. Ironically, it was only after Jordan and Councilmember Sneddon threatened to take the matter to the full council that City Administrator Rebecca Bjork and Bosse got serious about making the changes. Some of the changes, Jordan said, he can discuss. A lot, he said, he couldn’t do. At least not yet.
In most parts of the promenade, he said, there are likely to be two bike lanes in the center of the road, one leading to the road and the other down. Pedestrians move sideways. But in other parts of State Street – where there are few if any parklets – there is a greater focus on activating dead spaces with street furniture, children’s play equipment, basketball hoops, or maybe live music. In the blocks – the 700, 800, and 900 blocks – the bike lanes will be placed more on the side of the street with the most active retail areas. Different types of barricades will be tested on different parts of the street to force cyclists to dismount and walk from block to block.
“What we want to do,” Jordan said, “is see what works. And what doesn’t.”
But bikes, he stressed, aren’t going anywhere.
Support the Santa Barbara Independent through a long-term or a contribution.