State St. Travel Lanes To Close For Good

Big changes are coming to a downtown stretch of State Street Tuesday — as the current northbound vehicle travel lanes between Chapel and Audubon will be permanently closed, and the current southbound vehicle travel lanes will be converted to two-way.

That roadway changeup is part of a broader effort by the Elicker administration to improve safety for pedestrians and bike riders, and to open up new public space for transit-oriented development. 

The State Street reconfiguration details are included in a flyer published by the city’s Engineering Department as well as in a city alert to be sent out by the mayor at 6 p.m. Monday.

“Two-way traffic will be established on the west side (southbound side) of the landscaped medians, with one travel lane in each direction,” that traffic advisory one-pager reads. ​“New line striping and temporary traffic signals will be installed and activated overnight” — that is, between Monday night and Tuesday morning.

While these new changes will affect State Street between Chapel and Audubon, the Elicker administration has already closed the northbound travel lanes of State Street south of Chapel, down to Water.

In the mayoral notice scheduled for 6 p.m. Monday, Elicker wrote that, after this change, there will be one travel lane in each direction as well as turning lanes on what is currently the southbound lanes of State Street.

He said that all of this is part of the state-funded $6.7 million Lower State Street Redesign Project. The closed lanes previously used by vehicles ​“are being repurposed and redesigned for pedestrians and bicyclists and to help build hundreds of new transit-oriented housing units, including affordable housing units and additional development.”

These changes come roughly two weeks after the city’s Traffic Authority voted in support of a handful of other State Street-focused changes — from adding bike lanes to installing permanent parking spaces to removing a traffic light to converting a portion of Fair Street to two-way. The Board of Alders recently signed off on selling a 3.25-acre tract between Chapel and Fair — consisting of public parking lots and a discontinued portion of Street Street North — to the developers Gilbane and Xenolith, which plan on building that ex-public land into 450 new apartments. And in 2022, the city landed a $5.3 million state ​“Communities Challenge Grant” to help restore State Street to its pre-Urban Renewal status as a hub of downtown residential and commercial life, and not just a pseudo-highway on the eastern edge of downtown.

This also comes after the Elicker administration was turned down by the Traffic Authority earlier this month in its effort to convert a three-block downtown stretch of Chapel Street from one-way to two-way traffic. And it comes as the city is set to begin construction on long-in-the-works traffic calming changes to Whitney Avenue this very week.