Downtown Mobile Street Optimization Project
The Downtown Mobile Alliance saw an opportunity to truly transform its downtown into a successful, vital, and livable place, and the community offered their full support.
The 300-year-old port city of Mobile, Alabama has embraced the creative and economic rejuvenation of its historic downtown, buoyed by emerging arts and entertainment, renewed interest in historic preservation, and the arrival of new developments. While excited by these possibilities, residents remained discouraged by unfulfilled promises of crosswalks, bike lanes, and protection from high-speed traffic. High-speed driving and injury rates continue disproportionately along Mobile’s most iconic and touristed street.
In partnership with Speck & Associates, Nelson\Nygaard undertook a comprehensive study of Mobile’s streets, examining every block of the Mobile downtown grid. The team gathered input from residents, downtown workers, visitors, and city officials. Nelson\Nygaard’s recommendations included a deeper dive into the needs of neighborhoods excluded from previous planning boundaries and a prioritized list to capitalize on current momentum and enthusiasm, spurring a dramatic collection of changes quickly. These highly implementable actions included the immediate addition of missing crosswalks and signals to the most injurious streets, modifying plans for street work already scheduled in Mobile, reverting streets to two-way travel with all-way stop signs and the removal of unnecessary traffic signals, implementing bike lanes, and removing no-parking signs to calm traffic at the city’s social center.
Like many American downtowns, Mobile has a street network prepared for a traffic pattern more than three times its demand and network analysis illuminated a unique opportunity to repurpose roadways to reclaim space for a cycling network, more on-street parking, and conditions that are safer and more attractive for pedestrian-scale retail activity. Downtown Mobile is poised for increased economic activity that will bring new demand for street life and local business. Making downtown streets more walkable will support increased vitality and assure the streets will be safe and welcoming for all.
As of Fall 2025, the City has invested implementation dollars to engineer and build upgrades recommended in the plan. Restriping will convert 7 streets from 1-way to 2-way, adding 205 new on-street parking spaces in downtown. Two dozen signals will be converted to all-way stops, and bike lanes will be added to create a downtown network.