This post is prompted by two Indianapolis Star articles about an Indiana Senate bill, sponsored by Sen. Aaron Freeman, that would impose a temporary moratorium on dedicating street lanes to city-bus use. The Indianapolis Public Transportation Corporation (“IndyGo”) would otherwise appropriate lanes from Washington Street for a bus-rapid-transit (“BRT”) route to be called the Blue Line. We will see what those articles failed to report: that the Blue Line’s dedicated lanes will cost motorists much more time than they save bus riders.
Although one of the articles did mention that a study commissioned a decade ago by the Indianapolis Metropolitan Planning Organization found no justification for dedicated lanes, that article concentrated on “perceptions”:
Freeman referenced previous analyses by engineering firm HNTB that recommended against the use of dedicated lanes for the Blue Line. Those analyses determined there is not enough bus ridership along the route to justify dedicated lanes, and that the potential for "empty" lanes could lead to negative perceptions of the bus line.
This characterizes the problem poorly. More-complete reporting would have told readers how abysmally short of dedicated-lane standards the Blue Line will fall. Specifically, the Blue Line’s peak volume will be only four buses per hour, whereas for minimum to justify dedicated lanes down the middle of the street is sixty to ninety:
Perhaps unwittingly, though, the other article let slip a fact that illustrates those standards’ rationale. Dismissing as “preposterous” Sen. Freeman’s opinion that dedicated lanes would be detrimental, it pointed out that Washington Street conducts 17,000 vehicles per day:
Traffic on Washington Street has collapsed from 30,000 vehicles a day during the 1970s to 17,000 today, according to data collected by Indianapolis. . . . To put it simply: Washington Street has twice as many lanes as necessary to accommodate traffic. That's why traffic has become so dangerous there. Cars have too much room to speed and swerve, often with deadly consequences.
Now, the traffic-death increase is a relatively recent phenomenon, whereas the diversion of traffic from Washington Street to I-70 occurred half a century ago. So it’s hardly clear that the reason why “traffic has become so dangerous there” is the resultant reduction Washington Street traffic volume. And it’s not exactly self-evident that making riders walk to the middle of the street to catch a bus as the Blue Line will is a safety improvement over the current practice of boarding from the curb.
But we’ll leave the safety issues to others. Here we’ll focus instead on that 17,000-vehicles-per-day figure’s implication for dedicated lanes. Basically, what that number implies is that in the aggregate the Blue Line would probably impose at least thirteen hours in added driving time on motorists for each hour of riding time it saves bus riders.
To see how we arrived at that estimate we first need to understand that the number of cars using Washington Street on a given day is much more than 17,000; 17,000 is merely the number per day that pass a given location. Moreover, that 17,000 is the number of vehicles, not the number of people those vehicles transport. If we assume that the average vehicle occupancy is 1.25, then 17,000 vehicles translates to about 21,000 occupants passing an average location.
As to Blue Line ridership, a prior post reported that 1.2–1.6 million riders per year is apparently IndyGo’s prediction. Although this seems optimistic, we’ll assume the upper value and the thereby-implied 4400 riders per day. But we need to take into account that IndyGo’s ridership estimate applies to the entire 24.5-mile route rather than, as the traffic count did, to an average location. Since FTA data imply that the average IndyGo trip length is 4.4 miles, we could choose about 790 riders per day (≈ 4400 riders per day × 4.4 miles ÷ 24.5 miles) as a reasonable estimate. But we’ll instead treat those 4400 rides as being concentrated on the 14.1-mile portion east of Holt Road. That makes our estimate of the number of bus riders who pass a given location 1400 per day (≈ 4400 riders per day × 4.4 miles ÷ 14.1 miles): we estimate that the other vehicles’ occupants will be fifteen times as numerous as the buses’.
Now, Washington Street’s lane configuration is a little complicated, varying significantly along the proposed Blue Line Route. As IndyGo’s presentation explains, moreover, the proposed dedicated-lane configurations vary, too. According to Sen. Freeman’s estimate, the overall result is that the Blue line would end up appropriating 60% of the street’s lane miles. But in estimating the dedicated lanes’ effect we’ll just think of Washington Street as basically four lanes, of which the Blue Line would appropriate two. Roughly, then, two lanes will carry fifteen times as many car occupants and the other two carry bus riders.
And fifteen times as many Indianapolis residents will lose time as will save it. Dedicated-lane proponents tend to dismiss this effect, of course. For example, the above-mentioned opinion piece said, “Washington Street has twice as many lanes as necessary to accommodate traffic.” And, in truth, we don’t know how much time being restricted to one lane will add to motorists’ commute. But apparently before IndyGo recognized the implications it was saying the delay would be significant. Here’s what an IndyGo presentation said about its Purple Line:
On the 3.9-mile stretch between Post Road and Emerson Avenue, that is, IndyGo contended that replacing the normal route with a BRT will save each rider 4.0 minutes but cost each motorist 3.5.
True, that’s the Purple Line, which will run along 38th Street, not the Blue Line, which will run along Washington Street. But the above-depicted Indiana Department of Transportation data show that those streets’ traffic is quite similar. The red-curve, Washington Street counts were taken in January 2015 in the Irvington area, while its blue-curve, 38th Street counts taken in April 2016 between Irvington and Ritter.
So, if there’s any truth to what IndyGo said, we can expect that along a 3.9-mile stretch of its route the Blue Line will save bus riders about 4.0 min/rider × 1440 riders/day ÷ 60 min/hr ≈ 96 hours per day but cost car occupants about 3.5 min/occupant × 21,000 occupants/day ÷ 60 min/hr ≈ 1225 hours per day: car occupants will lose nearly thirteen hours for every hour bus riders save.
Now, that result was based on the average ratio of fifteen car occupants passing a given location for every bus rider who does, whereas the ratios during the morning and evening rush hours are more like ten and fourteen, respectively. Also, the Blue Line will no doubt cause some drivers to abandon Washington Street and reduce their time loss to a degree.
But our result above is probably still an underestimate. For one thing, IndyGo tends to be optimistic in its ridership predictions. As a previous post explained, moreover, the time savings IndyGo predicted was only the riding time; BRTs’ greater stop spacing will actually cost enough in extra walking time that the average bus rider’s overall savings will be less than the average motorist’s loss. If we had taken walking time into account, our result would have been that car occupants will lose more like thirty hours for every hour bus riders save.
None of this has found its way into any of the press coverage of Sen. Freeman’s bill. The news media have not served Indianapolis well.
According to current real estate listings like below, traffic is twice the 17,000 figure.
https://www.loopnet.com/viewer/pdf?file=https%3a%2f%2fimages1.loopnet.com%2fd2%2fahj9VdGNBEZ07tnZAKKuneOxY8miy6gGEy7xNqb6hkY%2fSI%2520DevelopmentIndianapolis%2520INflyer.pdf
The media is a propaganda outlet. They take press releases, rework them and pretend they are doing reporting. Then after the horse is out of the barn, they report on everything that they were told was true beforehand and act like they discovered something new and then get an award for great reporting. Of course, nothing ever happens to the thieves in charge.