Did COVID Accidentally Fix State Street?

Santa Barbara closed its main street to cars during the pandemic. Six years later, the temporary solution has become a debate about what downtown should be.

There are worse places to be stuck in traffic than Santa Barbara.

But apparently State Street is even nicer when there isn't any traffic at all.

Walk through downtown today and you'll see people doing things that once would have seemed slightly strange in the middle of Santa Barbara's principal commercial street: eating dinner where cars used to drive, wandering down the roadway with a coffee, pushing strollers, riding bicycles and generally behaving as though State Street were a plaza rather than a street.

It wasn't some grand urban-planning experiment.

It started because of COVID.

In 2020, with restaurants struggling and indoor dining severely restricted, Santa Barbara closed eight blocks of State Street to vehicles. Restaurants spilled into the roadway. Tables, chairs, umbrellas and improvised parklets appeared.

A pandemic survival measure unexpectedly changed the experience of downtown.

And people liked it.

The promenade has since expanded into a roughly 10-block pedestrian corridor between Gutierrez and Sola Streets, with limited vehicle access on one block for Granada Theatre drop-offs.

But here's where the story gets interesting.

Santa Barbara has been tinkering with State Street for much longer than six years.

Back in 1969, the city redesigned six blocks of downtown State Street, removing parking lanes, widening the pedestrian environment and developing the network of paseos connecting State Street with parking behind the businesses. Those little passages that today seem quintessentially Santa Barbara were partly the result of a decidedly unromantic problem: where to put the cars.

So COVID didn't really invent the idea of making State Street more pedestrian-friendly.

It finished an experiment Santa Barbara had been conducting for half a century.

There are complications, of course.

Restaurants gained valuable outdoor space while other businesses didn't necessarily receive the same benefit. Cyclists and pedestrians must share the promenade. Merchants still need deliveries. Theatergoers need access. And what looked perfectly acceptable as an emergency collection of parklets during a pandemic isn't necessarily what Santa Barbara wants its premier downtown street to look like permanently.

That's why the city has spent years debating what comes next.

This month, Santa Barbara officially adopted its State Street Master Plan, a long-range vision intended to guide the corridor for the next 20 to 30 years. It calls for a more permanent pedestrian-oriented downtown with improved public spaces, bicycle and pedestrian connections and support for local businesses.

Which leaves Santa Barbara with an unusual question.

Cities routinely spend millions trying to create lively pedestrian districts where people will eat outside, walk around and linger.

Santa Barbara created one by accident.

Now it has to figure out what to do with it.