IndyGo exec on Red Line: Progress takes patience

Roscoe Brown didn’t expect this to be easy. Some of IndyGo’s critics are pushing back on the new Red Line bus rapid transit project. But progress doesn’t happen without struggle.

“We’re going through a lot of change now. But you have to go through the process to get to the end result,” said Brown, IndyGo’s chief operating officer and vice president of operations.

“We’re experiencing that now – people are talking about all the construction – but a year from now it’s going to be really exciting to see the things folks have to say.”

The Red Line, scheduled to begin this year, will run 13 miles on mostly dedicated lanes from Broad Ripple through downtown Indy to the University of Indianapolis. The idea is to connect major employers, who represent a quarter of Marion County’s jobs, in a densely populated area with buses arriving every 10 minutes for 20 hours a day, seven days a week. Such systems are known as bus rapid transit, or BRT lines, and can be found in Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, Las Vegas and Eugene, Oregon.

Pent-up demand
The Red Line is budgeted to cost $96.3 million, funded mostly through a federal grant with matching funds from Indianapolis, Carmel, Westfield, Greenwood and other sources.

The line’s virtues – frequent service and dedicated lanes – are also the source of the biggest complaints: Construction is tying up traffic and impacting parking and neighborhoods along stretches of College and Meridian. Some businesses say they’ll be badly hurt when customers find it harder to park.

It doesn’t help that only about 2 percent of county residents use the bus system now. If that’s all we’re helping, the argument goes, why create big hassles for everyone else?

But nearly 60 percent of county residents voted for bus rapid transit and a new transit tax in 2016, which is expected to create $54 million annually in funding.

“There’s a tendency to look at past performance when deciding whether to make something better,” Brown said. “You could focus on the 2 or 3 percent of people who use the system now, or you could point to the 60 percent of people who supported the new transit plan.

“This indicates that there’s pent-up demand beyond what the level of service was previously. That 2 percent level indicates the demand based on the service we were able to supply – the frequency of hours, the reliability, the connectivity, the convenience. Those are all limiting factors, and I think that difference between the 2 percent who are using it, and the nearly 60 percent who voted to support it represents a key market for us to grow.”

Reliable, frequent service
The first BRT line is part of a reorganization of the bus network emphasizing frequent service and plenty of connections. The Red Line will be the spine of that system, and IndyGo says other cities have seen significant ridership increases with BRT systems.

 

Brown thinks community support will grow, but that even those who don’t use transit themselves understand it benefits Indianapolis.

“Even if they don't ride, they may be only a few degrees of separation from people who do," he said.

“So people they know, neighbors, family members, maybe their employees, are dependent upon public transportation. They recognize that a good public transportation system helps everybody – it’s part of the socioeconomic fabric of the community.”

Brown with a class of new IndyGo coach operators. 
They are "ambassadors" for the bus system, he tells them.

Boost in riders expected

IndyGo points to a ridership model that was used to locate the line where it will do the most good, based on data from other projects that have been federally funded across the country. The model estimates the Red Line will provide 11,000 rides per day. The entire system now has about 35,000 daily riders.

Indy’s bus system has been based on a hub-and-spoke system dating to the 1950s. As the city grew, public transportation did not keep pace, and at one point Indianapolis was not even among the top 100 cities in terms of transit size.

Even today, though Indianapolis is the nation’s 16^th largest city, the transit system is still ranked only 65th in transit investment.       

“That tells you how far we have to go,” Brown says.

Supporters say a stronger transit system will help drive economic growth, tying the new grid network and BRT system – the Red Line is only the first of three that are planned – with the growth of the city and its convention business.

“The community’s been talking about this for a long time. We’ve studied public transit, we’ve studied mobility for a long time,” Brown said.

“It’s time to start investing.”


By John Strauss, jcs1122@yahoo.com