Drivers and pedestrians moving through downtown Bellevue have a new splash of color to navigate: a crosswalk at 106th Avenue NE and NE 10th Street now features artwork by local artist Kenji Stoll, one of four newly painted intersections the city is testing in a pilot program that evaluates safety; the city says the asphalt art itself is intended purely for aesthetic purposes.
Four Crosswalks, Two Artists, One Experiment
The installations are the result of a joint effort between Bellevue’s Transportation and Community Development departments, according to downtownbellevue.com. City staff added artistic treatments to four crosswalks around Bellevue, with Puget Sound artists Nikita Ares and Kenji Stoll each contributing two of the designs. The crosswalk at 106th Avenue NE and NE 10th Street is one of Stoll’s, according to a reel posted by the City of Bellevue, Washington - Government on Facebook, which credited aerial videos and images of the project to Chance Merchant.
Each artist worked within a defined palette, allowed to use up to six colors in their designs, per the same outlet. The funding behind the project traces back to a U.S. Department of Transportation Safe Streets and Roads for All grant, paired with support from Bellevue’s Community Development Arts and Culture program, downtownbellevue.com reports.
What the City Is Actually Testing
Bellevue’s Transportation and Community Development departments are evaluating the safety impacts of the artistic crosswalk treatments, not just handing out new paint jobs for the sake of aesthetics. The core questions, as framed by downtownbellevue.com, are straightforward: do painted crosswalks improve safety, are they practical to maintain, and does the community actually like them? KOMO News reports the pilot is meant to explore how art might improve safety around intersections — whether by increasing driver attention, improving pedestrian visibility, or, conversely, causing distraction.
The city's own project page indicates the artistic crosswalks are being compared against a dozen control or no-treatment crosswalks elsewhere in Bellevue, with performance measures that may include safety, maintenance and community sentiment, according to bellevuewa.gov. The post author invited the public to complete a quick survey about the new Creative Crosswalks, a step downtownbellevue.com describes as taking roughly five minutes.
Mixed Signals From Other Cities
Bellevue isn’t the first city to run this experiment, and the results elsewhere have been far from uniform. After a painted crosswalk was completed in Richmond, close calls between pedestrians and motorists dropped by eight incidents, a decline of more than 56 percent, according to the Washington Post.
Austin tells a more cautionary story. The city removed three experimental crosswalks earlier this year after the Federal Highway Administration ended a safety study and ordered the sites restored to standard white markings, according to KUT. Those crosswalks had been installed in October 2024 as part of an FHWA study testing whether colorful or patterned pavement markings affect pedestrian safety, the station reports. Federal officials determined the aesthetic treatments degraded both detection and recognition of the crosswalk as a traffic control device for pedestrians with low vision.
Austin’s research findings were genuinely mixed rather than a flat failure. Some aesthetic treatments appeared to improve how often drivers stopped to let people cross, KUT notes, even as crash data at the three sites showed little meaningful change — annualized crash rates there declined from 0.2 crashes per year to zero. That tension between improved driver behavior and accessibility concerns is likely part of what Bellevue’s pilot is designed to untangle before deciding whether Creative Crosswalks expand beyond the current four intersections.
