State Street master plan design advances; committee presses on ADA details, transit and cost

The Access Advisory Committee spent the bulk of its special meeting reviewing the State Street Master Plan draft, with staff and consultants describing a design that widens sidewalks to roughly 30 feet on either side, reserves a 20-foot central corridor for emergency and flexible vehicle/transit use and proposes retractable bollards to change street operations by time of day.

Tess Harris, the city’s State Street master planner, said the plan reflects five years of public engagement and includes goals such as expanding the urban canopy, improving multimodal access and replacing aging stormwater and utility infrastructure. "We are proposing 30-foot sidewalks with a 20-foot travel lane area," Harris said when asking whether the committee supported the design approach and the use of retractable bollards.

Design lead Stephanos Palazoides described a sectional approach that preserves emergency access while enlarging pedestrian space and introducing midblock crossings and a sycamore canopy expected to provide shade in 10–15 years. Consultants noted that retractable bollards and crash-rated planters are used internationally and domestically and said local examples were studied, but maintenance, lifespan and fail-safe procedures would need to be specified by manufacturer choice.

Committee members and public commenters focused heavily on accessibility details. Multiple committee members said the master plan must explicitly locate accessible parking spaces rather than relying on general statements; staff pointed to plan language that identifies at least one accessible space on each side of intersections but agreed to show those spaces visually in future materials. Several members flagged paving texture and grout lines as potential vibration hazards for personal mobility devices and requested that detectable warning surfaces (truncated domes) and curb treatments be shown in design renderings. Consultant Miguel Nunees said retractable bollards can be equipped with RFID or remote controls for emergency services and that manual overrides exist for malfunctions.

The committee debated the project’s geographic priorities and operations. Some members questioned whether the civic/commercial 700–900 block stretch should receive the highest investment, and others urged a staged approach that builds on what is already working in the 500-block entertainment area. Staff offered a high-level cost estimate of about $60 million (approximately $8 million per block), noting that roughly half of that estimate addresses stormwater and utility upgrades that are likely needed to support additional housing downtown.

Staff said that operational details (exact hours when the street would be closed to private vehicles or configured for transit) were intentionally removed from the master plan at council’s direction and will be discussed separately as a transportation operations matter. Committee members called for a dedicated transit/shuttle solution that is ADA-accessible and reliable if portions of State Street will be periodically closed to private vehicles.

Staff committed to follow-up: returning with detailed transportation topics, showing accessible parking locations in plan visuals, clarifying truncated-dome placement with the building department and refining cost estimates during the schematic design phase.