The city's "Red Line" bus project, which installed a dedicated bus lane and station-like bus stops from downtown to Broad Ripple, has caused a lot of traffic rearrangement. I've tried to bear with it; I'm not a fan, but we're getting streets repaved and left-turn lights at intersections from this, so it's not without direct benefit.
Downtown, the Red Line used up a bike lane on a one-way street. The city had a solution: widen the bike lane on the next street over, already one-way in the other direction, and make the bike lane a two-way path with dedicated signals, leaving car traffic one-way.
Drivers are finding this confusing. The bicycle signals have a silhouette of a bike on the light, but apparently that's not enough.
It's not ideal -- but downtown traffic has never been ideal; this is just a new way for it to be a compromise.
BUILDING A 1:1 BALUN
4 years ago
5 comments:
First of all, if you wish to see easily confused drivers qorse than Indy try DC, Detroit, Houston and Atlanta.
Second of all, is this the tail wagging the dog? Are there enough bicycle riders to justify the reversal of the morms? NYC seems to have a problem with that demographic usage vs political power.
Not sure the population density in sub-500,000 population cities could mandate that. Been wrong before; will be wrong again but I'd watch for bicycle rider fatalities as well as pedestrians since the change. Murphy will have his input.
Indianapolis was over a million people, last time I checked. There's a lot of bicycle traffic and until we got bike lanes, it was starting to get in the way. Not so much we have bike traffic jams (though weekends when the weather is good, the trails can be crowded) and a lot of the use is recreational -- but (with the exception of the scary lanes on Broad Ripple Avenue), they are used.
The new bus line may see an uptick in ridership as well; it was supposedly based on traffic patterns and it should be an improvement in on-time arrival over the previous service. And there was no way to fit the bus line in downtown without rearranging bike lanes. We also got some heavily used and well-cratered streets repaved in that area, where the city had been constrained to patch a little at a time for decades because they didn't want to reroute traffic. They had to bite the bullet and make major improvement to automobile infrastructure to get their fancy bus upgrade, work we might never have seen otherwise.
Correction: 863,002 in the city-county, and about as many in the surrounding counties.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indianapolis_metropolitan_area
Indianapolis is no Portland, but it's still quite bike-friendly and lots of people make use of the trails.
Source: I use a bicycle as a vehicle in Indianapolis.
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