COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) — Columbus City Council took a necessary step Monday in order to move forward with the Capital Line, a project aimed at making downtown more pedestrian and bike-friendly.
The Capital Line project is set to be a two-mile pathway through the heart of downtown Columbus with city leaders saying this project would not only completely reimagine downtown, but it would also have a major economic impact.
“I’m happy to see that the city is actually, you know, doing some progressive things here,” downtown Columbus resident Charles Farris said. “It’s going to help, you know, the community here and I’m looking forward to it, actually,”
Farris has lived and worked in downtown Columbus for more than seven years. Since living downtown, he’s become quite the avid walker and biker.
“We walk a lot to the events that are over here, like the Bicentennial Park, Jazz and Rib Festival, other festivals that’s going on around here,” he said. “It will be a smoother transition as far as, you know, going from this building or any other building around here, over to those events as close by.”
At Monday night’s city council meeting, board members voted to solidify the partnership between Downtown Columbus Inc. and the public service department, a necessary step toward moving forward with this project.
“We plan for the first phase to be complete in the first quarter of 2027 and the exciting part is, we will be immediately moving on to phase two, three and four,” Downtown Columbus Inc. President Amy Taylor said. “This is a synergistic project where we’ll be moving on as soon as we complete construction on one side, we’ll be gaining construction on another.”
Taylor said Columbus looked at other cities that have created similar plans, like Charlotte, N.C., with the Rail Trail and the Cultural Trail in Indianapolis.
“The number one thing we saw is that there was a major economic impact with everything, so the average was for every dollar spent on developing this urban path, there was a $27 return,” Taylor said.
More than 13,000 people live downtown and according to city leaders, by 2040, that number could near 40,000, meaning that this project is an amazing opportunity for both safety and mobility.
“This ensures that people have a path that’s not just on our roadways that is dedicated to them to move around downtown in the place that we know everybody wants to be, because downtown is everyone’s neighborhood,” Columbus City Councilwoman Lourdes Barroso de Padillasaid.
The project is still in its design phase, but once that’s done, construction on Gay Street could begin soon after.
To learn more about the project and see the renderings, click here.