Drive Grand Boulevard between 14th and 29th today and you'll find exactly what you found last winter: two lanes each direction, no turn lane, cars stacking up behind anyone trying to turn left toward Rockwood or Manito Park. That's true even though the Spokane Transportation Commission voted unanimously on February 19 to cut the street down to one lane each direction with a center turn lane. Seven months of headlines, zero months of orange cones.
That gap between the vote and the pavement is not a delay. It's the plan working as designed, and understanding why tells you more about how this street actually gets fixed than any of the coverage from February did.
Why the Street Hasn't Moved
The Transportation Commission wasn't approving a standalone construction project with its own budget line and contractor bid. It was approving a design for a repaving job the city had already scheduled for 2027, before anyone brought crash data to a public meeting. City engineers, including Associate Traffic Engineer Brian Brisendine, built the case around real numbers: at least 14,000 vehicles a day on this stretch, peak traffic between 4 and 5 p.m., and 42 reported crashes between 2020 and 2024. Without a turn lane, drivers waiting to turn left sit in a through lane, and the city calculated that a dedicated turn lane alone would have prevented eight of those 42 crashes. Pair the turn lane with dropping a second through lane, and the number climbs to ten, or about 24 percent, which is the crash-reduction figure the city has repeated at every public meeting since.
That case was strong enough to win a unanimous vote. But the restriping itself rides along on paint trucks that were already coming for the routine grind and overlay work. No new capital project means no new funding fight and no accelerated timeline. It also means residents who assumed construction would follow the vote by a few months have been watching an unchanged street for most of a year, and will keep watching it for most of another.
When the repave does happen, the specifics are already locked in. The remaining lanes widen from 10 feet to 11, matching what Spokane Transit Authority requested for its bus fleet. Roughly four concrete refuge islands go in for pedestrians, likely at 19th, 20th, 21st, and 27th Avenues, alongside an upgraded crossing at 27th. Travel time adds an estimated 30 seconds heading northbound and 60 seconds southbound during peak hours, mostly from buses stopping in what's now a single through lane instead of a passing lane.
The Split Reaction
The 180 pages of public comment the commission received before its vote broke down about how you'd expect for a street that runs past both a hospital and a beloved city park. Residents in the Manito-Cannon Hill area largely supported the change. One commenter's written testimony framed it plainly: support for anything that cuts traffic near the park, "because my kids' lives depend on it."
The clearest opposition came from the Spokane Business Association, represented at the hearing by Gavin Cooley and Brad Barnett. The group, founded by developer Larry Stone, has opposed lane reductions elsewhere in Spokane on the same grounds it raised here: fewer through lanes means more congestion pushed onto side streets, and a shared center turn lane invites drivers to pass stopped buses dangerously. Cooley's objection carried a personal note, too. He told the commission he lives roughly a block from 14th and Grand himself.
Sarah Rose, co-director of the safety advocacy group Spokane Reimagined, pushed in the opposite direction. She supported the lane reduction but argued the city stopped short. Her preferred version would have used three 10-foot lanes instead of 11-foot ones, freeing up five feet on each side for bike lanes, or gone further with a fully protected two-way cycle track. The plan that passed does neither. It will not include bike lanes at all, a detail confirmed by multiple outlets covering the vote.
Neighborhood councils felt sidelined by the whole process. Bill Doley, who chairs the Rockwood Neighborhood Council, put it bluntly when describing how traffic calming decisions used to work compared to now: the city used to work directly with neighborhoods on this kind of thing, and now, in his words, nobody listens.
Businesses along the corridor are watching from a different angle entirely. Igor Yorke opened Sweet Tooth, a donut and coffee shop, on Grand Boulevard in October 2025. He's still building a customer base and worries any construction disruption could scare off the new regulars he's gained since opening. Across the street, Logan Sevier, general manager of South Hill Little Euro's, sees it the other way. A crosswalk the city installed near his shop last year already slowed traffic down, and he thinks the restripe could do the same thing for the better, giving customers a safer approach to his door instead of a faster one past it.
Here's what actually changes once the repave happens on this stretch:
- Four lanes become three: one through lane each direction plus a shared center turn lane
- Lane width grows from 10 feet to 11 feet
- Roughly four pedestrian refuge islands, likely near 19th, 20th, 21st, and 27th
- An enhanced crossing at 27th Avenue
- No new bike lanes
- An estimated 30 to 60 seconds added to peak travel time depending on direction
One Street, Two Different Fixes
Anyone who assumes the rest of Grand Boulevard gets the same treatment is working from the wrong map. The city's six-year street plan includes a second, entirely separate project further south, between 29th and 37th Avenues, built around a different problem: getting kids to Sacajawea Middle School safely on foot. That stretch currently carries three, four, and in places five lanes. The plan there calls for narrower lane widths, new bike lanes, and intersection changes aimed at pedestrian routes to the school. It's also scheduled for 2027, but it's a different scope, driven by a different rationale, decided as part of a different planning cycle.
So if you live north of 29th, expect a turn lane and wider through lanes, no bike infrastructure. If you're south of 29th near the middle school, expect bike lanes as part of the fix. Same street name, same construction year, two different outcomes depending on which few blocks you call home.
Who Actually Decided This
Worth understanding, too: the body that approved the Grand Boulevard redesign wasn't the elected City Council. It was the Spokane Transportation Commission, an appointed body created under Mayor Lisa Brown's administration to evaluate exactly this kind of project. That structure has drawn its own scrutiny. In May, Councilman Michael Cathcart pushed publicly for more council oversight of lane reductions and one-way-to-two-way conversions after watching the same commission move toward similar changes on Spokane Falls Boulevard downtown. City spokeswoman Erin Hut said the administration is working with Cathcart toward a compromise that would have staff brief the council on major changes without requiring a separate standalone vote for each one. If you're tracking whether other South Hill streets could see similar redesigns down the line, this is the process to watch, not just the individual project pages.
For now, the honest answer for anyone living along Grand Boulevard is that nothing on the ground has changed since last winter, and nothing will until the city's already-scheduled 2027 paving work catches up to what the commission approved in February. The crosswalk improvements, the turn lane, the wider lanes: all of it is real, all of it is coming, and none of it required a new project to make happen. It just needed a street that was getting repaved anyway.
If you're weighing what any of this means for a home near Grand Boulevard, whether you're comparing the street's current four-lane feel against what it becomes in 2027, or trying to figure out which side of 29th Avenue you'd rather live on, The Collection can walk you through it block by block. Request a complimentary consultation and home valuation, and let's talk about what you're actually buying into on this stretch of the South Hill.
