Why This Street Needs a “Flat and Flexible” Design

Further, with regards to “the decline of retail” on State Street, I highly recommend listening to Executive Director for Downtown Santa Barbara Robin Elander’s two-minute public comment from the June 27 City Council meeting on this topic. She provides compelling statistics, which demonstrate that retail trends in Santa Barbara are directly correlated with ongoing national retail trends and are not the fault of the promenade being closed to cars. 

One out of every five people who took our survey said they were biking on State Street because it was safer than the surrounding streets. By including designated bike lanes on State Street, the “Flat and Flexible” design option enables local businesses to benefit from cyclists looking to spend money downtown, while also maintaining a higher standard of safety for people of all ages seeking to enjoy Santa Barbara by bike. 

“We’re giving too much space to bikes.”

State Street is 80 feet wide. MIG’s “Flat and Flexible” design proposes creating a 12-foot-wide bike path. That’s 15% of the total available width—an exceedingly reasonable value that seems even more so upon recollection of the fact that prior to the pandemic, cars dominated a majority of State Street’s width. Keep in mind, too, that California requires 20 feet of clear space for fire/emergency access, meaning that no matter what design is chosen, there will always be space that contains no seating, planters, or other features. Why not use 12 of the mandated 20 to accommodate bikes (thereby leaving the remaining 85% for pedestrians)?

Of all three options, the “Flat and Flexible” design gives the least space to cars on the State Street promenade, leaving plenty of room to be split up between bicycles and pedestrians.

“If cycling requires so much design, why bother at all? Make the promenade pedestrian-only and ban bikes entirely, especially e-bikes.”

Use is informed by design. That’s one of the most important things I learned while studying Transportation Engineering. If a road has few cross streets or stoplights and consists of wide lanes, people will drive on it at high speeds regardless of the posted speed limit. Conversely, if a road has features like speed bumps, turns, or short sight lines, drivers will slow down as the physical space demands they pay more attention.

The same holds true for bikes: the existing 40-foot-wide, unmarked asphalt space in the middle of State Street invites unruly cycling behavior simply because no barriers to speeding exist there. Narrow the bike path to 12 feet—six feet in each direction—with frequent crosswalks and turns, and cyclists will be forced to slow considerably, while the more speed-prone cyclists will avoid the space entirely. This form of designing for use is not burdensome, but empowering; if we construct the downtown corridor correctly, the users we’re targeting will appear. 

Cyclists and pedestrians coexist in common spaces across the world, and there are ample examples of successful implementation of this design methodology. One need not look far. At the University of California, Santa Barbara, for example, 12-foot-wide cycling paths wind their way across the campus, paralleling and intersected by pedestrian walkways. Walk to the bottom of State Street, and you’ll find the Cabrillo Beach Path, where bikes and people have been thrown together in the same exact space.

Rather than reading of constant crashes and injuries, as one might expect based on claims made about State Street, people seem to coexist peacefully. That’s because the design informs the use: a narrow concrete path with plants/sand on either side keeps unruly/higher-speed bikers away, while the constant need to pay attention to other users slows everyone down collectively. (You can read about more real-world examples in the near future on my Medium website.)