Old Town Goleta's Roundabouts Are Done. The Real Argument on Hollister Avenue Isn't.

Is Old Town Goleta done changing, or does it just look that way from the driver's seat?

The K-rails that lined Hollister Avenue through early 2026 are gone. Two roundabouts now sit where State Route 217 crosses overhead, and a third opened in July where Pine Avenue meets Ekwill Street. If you've been avoiding that stretch since the construction started, you'd be forgiven for assuming the disruption is behind you. It isn't, not entirely, and the piece that's still genuinely unsettled has almost nothing to do with the roundabouts everyone's been watching.

Three projects, one corridor

Old Town Goleta has had three separate things happening on top of each other, and most residents have experienced them as a single, undifferentiated headache called "the construction." They're not the same project, and they're not on the same clock.

The first is Project Connect, the city's largest capital improvement effort ever undertaken, a $62.7 million build-out that broke ground in March 2024 and is expected to wrap in spring 2027. This is the roundabout work: the twin circles under the 217, the new one at Pine and Ekwill, a rebuilt bridge over San Jose Creek, and the still-unfinished Ekwill Street extension linking Kellogg Avenue to Fairview Avenue. Contractor Security Paving has been running all four pieces at once.

The second is the interim striping project, which predates Project Connect and isn't technically part of it. Back in 2024, the city repainted Hollister from four lanes down to two, added back-in angled parking and bike lanes, and called it a pilot. It's still a pilot. Nobody has made it permanent, and nobody has reversed it.

The third is cosmetic: a new mural going up on the side of Carpeteria Carpet One at 5610 Hollister Ave, designed by local artist Jessica Altstatt and approved by Goleta's Design Review Board in June 2026.

Here's where each one actually stands right now:

The roundabouts and the mural are both, in different ways, close to settled. The striping is the one still genuinely up for grabs.

What's actually finished

The roundabout work has moved fast once it got going. Trek Santa Barbara manager Jerry Ferraro described his old commute through the area bluntly: getting to work used to eat 20 minutes just navigating the pre-roundabout tangle. Since the Pine and Ekwill intersection opened, Councilmember James Kyriaco has framed it as the missing piece of an east-west route through Old Town that doesn't dump every car onto Hollister. Resident Lawrence Boehm's read on it was simpler: traffic doesn't move as fast through there as it used to.

That's the intended effect, and on the roundabout front, it's landed. The city's Project Connect page still lists work remaining on street lighting, sidewalks, curb ramps, and creek restoration, but the core traffic pattern at both intersections is now in place and isn't going to change again.

What's still coming

The Ekwill Street extension is the one piece of Project Connect that hasn't caught up to the roundabouts around it. Work on that corridor started in June 2026 and is targeted for completion by late fall, which means the Pine and Ekwill roundabout will keep operating with a single travel lane in each direction until the rest of the street around it is finished. Landscaping, mitigation plantings along San Jose Creek, and the finer details at both Hollister roundabouts, the striping, the lighting, are also still being worked through, even though the traffic pattern itself is locked in.

None of that is in question. Spring 2027 remains the city's stated target for the full Project Connect build-out, and every piece still pending is a matter of finishing, not deciding.

The piece nobody's actually finished arguing about

The striping project is a different animal, because the city itself has never called it done. When Hollister went from four lanes to two, with back-in angled parking replacing the old configuration, city data presented to the Goleta City Council showed vehicle speeds down and collisions down, with pedestrian activity up since the change took effect. That's the case for keeping it.

The case against it is coming from the merchants standing on the sidewalk. Goleta Barbers owner Peter Jimenez has been blunt about the toll:

"Since the beginning of the construction, I feel from there to now it's been about 40%," he said, referring to a decline in business.

Jimenez isn't alone in flagging the back-in parking as a source of confusion rather than convenience. Drivers accustomed to nose-in spaces have had to relearn the maneuver, and city officials have acknowledged it may take more time to fully understand the long-term effects on both safety and commerce. That's the honest state of things: the data reads one way, the storefronts read another, and nobody in city government has said which one wins.

What that means practically is that the striping is the only piece of this whole multi-year project that could still look different a year from now. The roundabouts aren't getting rebuilt. The mural isn't getting repainted. Whether Hollister keeps its two-lane configuration once Project Connect fully wraps in 2027 is the one call still open.

Why the mural showed up right now

The timing of the mural isn't a coincidence, and the city hasn't pretended otherwise. It's funded through Goleta's Old Town Pride of Place grant program, one of two murals the program is currently backing, the other on the side of the Santa Barbara Aquatics building further down Hollister. Carpeteria Carpet One owner Avo Semerjian wrote the disruption directly into his grant application, arguing the mural would help beautify an area that's spent two years absorbing construction noise and detours.

The design itself leans hard into Goleta specifics rather than generic coastal imagery: three panels running twelve feet tall, moving from monarch butterflies to jumping dolphins to lemons and avocados representing the area's agricultural history, with California poppies, seaside daisies, and the native Gaviota tarplant worked into the border. Board members debated whether to include lettering at all, with Jonathan Eymann pushing for the word "Goleta" itself to appear on the wall as a statement rather than an afterthought.

Kyriaco tied the mural directly to the rest of what's changed in Old Town, calling it one more example of the community showing up for itself alongside the splash pad and the new roundabouts. That's a fair read of the sequence. The roundabouts fixed circulation. The mural is meant to fix how the area feels while everything else finishes. Only the striping is still deciding what Old Town actually becomes.

What this means if you're driving through Old Town this fall

• Expect the Pine and Ekwill roundabout to stay at one lane in each direction until the Ekwill extension finishes, targeted for late fall 2026.
• Expect the back-in parking and two-lane configuration on Hollister to remain exactly as it is. No timeline has been announced for a permanent decision either way.
• Expect ongoing crews at both Hollister roundabouts working on landscaping and lighting, not traffic pattern changes.
• Watch for the Carpeteria Carpet One mural to start taking shape on the wall at 5610 Hollister Ave now that the design has cleared review.

Old Town Goleta isn't finished changing. It's finished with the part that was always going to have a clear end date, and it's still working through the part that doesn't.

If you're curious how any of this fits into the bigger picture of buying or selling in Goleta, from what a corridor like this does to walkability and day-to-day convenience, to how infrastructure investment tends to play out over time, that's the kind of on-the-ground context Kendrick Guehr tracks closely. Reach out anytime you want a local read on what's actually happening, not just what it looks like from the road.