Recent Comments

I am on the fence on this issue, but don't agree with your argument as to why State St. is struggling. You are assuming that the decline is related to the pedestrian section and not something else. I would argue otherwise. There are problems that will plague the street even if it's opened up to cars. If you think opening it to cars is the solution without solving these other problems, we're just going to end up with a shabby, vacant street with people parading their cars bumping loud music and revving their engines. First, the most basic things are not being done to make the street attractive to people. Picking up trash, cleaning and rejuvenating the sidewalks, landscaping, policing kids racing on e-bikes, and moving homeless people to other places. It's pretty obvious that if you let a place look like garbage, people will not choose to spend their time there. Second, as some have pointed out, there is a shift away from retail, and in particular some kinds of retail. Starbucks is struggling nationwide. At the same time, you have some local boutique coffee shops like Mosaic that have opened. And third, if you really want to do this right, the State St. corridor is one of the places in town we _should_ be adding housing. You make it attractive again with maintenance and add housing, and you'll get plenty of tourists, locals, and residents to support the stores. Fourth, if you actually want know if this will work, you close State St. to vehicles including bikes. Especially e-bikes. Right now it's in a weird no-man's land where you can't walk _or_ drive on the street. It's functionally a teenager e-bike drag strip. And then you would extend the restaurant seating areas properly into the street -- and build them so they look like they belong there, not a makeshift camp. There is no need for bikes or cars on State St. from a conveyance perspective. Anacapa and Chapala have plenty of capacity for both. And people are not jumping out of a car to shop. They are going to park off Anacapa/Chapala/an adjacent lot and walk back to State St. The humans on foot are swiping the credit cards. The only minor benefit to having cars is the few people who will serendipitously see a new store. But you can more than replace this marketing effect by making it attractive to walk. Look, successful downtowns all over the world are pedestrian-only, so it's been proven out. There are many places you can see it working. On the other hand, it's not right for everywhere. I'm not sure it's right for Santa Barbara. State St. is frankly, pretty narrow and shaded. Maybe it just wasn't built right to be a grand downtown. The Cabrillo intersection is thriving -- it's got a lot of light, it's got the ocean. And the City has to have major vision to get a pedestrian downtown to work. We have a mayor who wants to open the street to cars, so I have a hunch that he's intentionally half-assing the whole project so that it will fail. Obviously, pretty conspiratorial, and hopefully not true. But it doesn't really matter what the intent is. It is being majorly half-assed.