Ballard: Red Line buses will deliver economic boost

 IndyGo Photo

A key feature of the Red Line bus rapid transit system is that the buses will be electric, not diesel powered. But even if there’s trouble getting that part of the system to work, one of the architects of the plan says the Red Line can still accomplish what he hoped it would.

“Pretty much every decision I made as mayor of Indianapolis was to attract talent to the city, creating the sort of environment that talent wants to move to,” said Greg Ballard.

Cities increasingly compete for talent – a key driver of economic development – on the basis of amenities such as good transportation and quality of life.

“Our mass transit was bad, rated very low. We said let’s make a plan. I think we had over 200 outreach meetings, really trying to listen to the community about what they wanted, what they were looking for, how we could make it better.”

Ballard, mayor from 2008-16, secured $75 million in federal money for the Red Line. The year he left office, voters approved a comprehensive transit plan featuring bus rapid transit lines and a new income tax expected to generate $54 million to help fund them.

Research shows millennials regard access to public transportation as a key factor in determining where to live and work.

“The younger generation doesn’t care nearly as much about cars as we did growing up, and they associate good transit with good quality of life in the city,” Ballard said.

“I talked about mobility options for people, and I found out that what millennial talent wants and what the seniors want is virtually the same thing in lots of areas, and this was one of them.”

The plan calls for electric buses, but complications arose when IndyGo found that the vehicles it intends to use on the Red Line did not deliver the expected range between charges. The city is still testing the buses and says it will not buy them if they don’t meet specifications. Albuquerque also planned to use the 60-foot electric buses from the same manufacturer, but cancelled the order because of performance issues.

Ballard wanted electric buses not for environmental reasons, but because the retired Marine lieutenant colonel is convinced that our addiction to petroleum for transportation forces us into Mideast conflicts.

That’s the premise of his new book from IU Press, “Less Oil or More Caskets: The National Security Argument for Moving Away from Oil.”

“Our troops have been in the Middle East for 40 years protecting the flow of oil at great cost,” he says.

That amounts to $81 billion annually to protect oil shipments, including those from Iran to China, according to the group Securing America’s Future Energy. In the past 40 years, that cost totals more than $5 trillion – and 6,000 U.S. lives.

Ballard writes that 70 percent of oil is used for transportation, and that we could switch to electric vehicles over the next 20 years and remove the need to send troops overseas to defend petroleum interests.

He created the city’s first Office of Sustainability in 2008 and later signed an order committing to convert all the city’s non-police vehicles to electric or plug-in hybrids.

Ballard drives a hybrid-electric car himself, and wanted the Red Line and other bus rapid transit lines, which use dedicated lanes and have a rider experience similar to trains, to run on electricity.

But even if the buses use diesel until the technology advances, the BRT plan would seem to be on track for meeting his biggest concern: providing mobility and economic development. 

Ballard credits Adam Thies, then director of metropolitan development, with first suggesting the full potential of the new system, starting with a north-sound spine running eventually from Carmel to Greenwood.

“He is brilliant, and he could see the future,” Ballard said. Thies is now assistant vice president for capital planning at Indiana University.

The Red Line’s first segment, 13 miles from Broad Ripple to the University of Indianapolis, is supposed to open by the fall.

“When you look at the map, it really makes sense,” Ballard said. “It connects the universities, neighborhoods and all those jobs downtown.

“This is what the people wanted.”

- By John Strauss