Misleading responses in a recent Indy Politics interview dispelled what little hope we might have harbored that Inez Evans’s departure as CEO would bring previously absent candor to public communications of the Indianapolis Public Transportation Corporation (“IndyGo”). In that interview IndyGo’s acting CEO Jennifer Pyrz spoke in favor of appropriating street lanes for exclusive city-bus use. Routes to which such lanes are dedicated are often called bus-rapid-transit (“BRT”) routes, and the interview focused primarily on plans for IndyGo’s third BRT route, the Blue Line. This post will describe the lack of candor that afflicted the interview.
But first we’ll mention a study that Ms. Pyrz said was “hot off the presses.” That study is interesting because of a major argument IndyGo had made for dedicating some of Washington Street’s lanes exclusively to Blue Line use. The argument was that thus depriving motorists of those lanes would make Washington Street safer by slowing motorists down. And it happens that in connection with a another IndyGo BRT line IndyGo had given estimates of the degree to which motorists might be slowed.
We suspect that IndyGo didn’t initially appreciate those estimates’ implications; after seeing that if the estimates prove accurate motorists will lose much more time than bus riders will save, IndyGo seems now to be changing its tune. Specifically, IndyGo apparently hired a consultant to produce the just-mentioned study, which according to Ms. Pyrz contradicts those inconvenient estimates by finding that with the advent of dedicated lanes on the stretches of College Avenue and Meridian Street now traveled by IndyGo’s Red Line “the average traffic speed along those corridors actually went up a bit.”
Not only that, but the study apparently provides IndyGo cover for a possible change in its position on the relationship between safety and speed. According to Ms. Pirz the study says that despite the purported speed increase “crashes along College Avenue and Meridian Street where we have dedicated lanes are about 40% less than they were in the three years before the Red Line was constructed.”
Even if such a crash-rate reduction did occur it may actually say more about traffic volume than it does about safety. Although the Indiana Department of Transportation estimates that traffic on College just north of 38th fell by only a little more than 25%, it also estimates that traffic on a Meridian location just eight blocks west of there fell by more than 40%. So we don’t really know how great the studied streets’ overall decrease was. The loss of travel lanes may have merely shifted traffic and the attendant crashes from those streets to others.
Whether it did or not is hard to tell, at least without access to the study. Indeed, there’s not much about the study we can be sure of, so at this point we’ll set it aside. But we’ve mentioned it because it illustrates a problem presented by IndyGo’s lack of candor. Specifically, any confidence we might otherwise have had in the characterization Ms. Pyrz gave it is undermined by the fact that as we will now see the answers she gave about other things were misleading.
Take what she said about the safety virtues of dedicated lanes: “We don’t have the congestion that comes with vehicles, which actually makes it safer both for us and for the vehicles.”
That statement is at odds with data from IndyGo’s own board reports. Plotted above, those data indicate that the buses of IndyGo’s current BRT route are nearly four times as accident-prone as those of routes that don’t enjoy dedicated lanes—which in turn are even more accident-prone than the average teen-aged driver. Moreover, the plot above represents only the numbers of accidents that IndyGo considers “preventable.” The reports’ numbers for collisions generally are about three times as great.
Ms. Pyrz also said that “through dedicated lanes we’re able to stay on a reliable schedule.” But the above plot from those same reports indicates that the BRT route’s on-time performance is usually inferior to non-BRT routes’.
And it was misleading for her to contend that dedicating lanes to the Blue Line “provides the rapid service that we’ve promised throughout all of the work that we’ve been doing.” By comparing the Red Line’s speed with other routes’ the plot above shows that “rapid service” hasn’t been much more rapid than regular service. Over the past year, in fact, the Red Line has been slower than IndyGo’s conventional routes.
Then there’s what Ms. Pyrz said about Route 8, which the Blue Line will replace:
The Route 8 operates in shared lanes and I can tell you right now it will take folks on the Route 8 about an hour to get from downtown to the airport. Once the Blue Line is in place it’ll take maybe 35 minutes.
But instead of an hour the Route 8 schedule says Route 8 can actually take as little as 36 minutes. True, Route 8 can take significantly longer at rush hour; the bus that leaves the Transit Center at 5:15 PM takes 42 minutes. But on that stretch only a single mile of the Blue Line’s “dedicated” lanes will actually exclude all other traffic; the rest will be shared with turning vehicles. So even if true the 35 minutes Ms. Pyrz predicts may similarly be only a sometime thing. Much if not all of any reduction the Blue Line will afford may be due less to dedicated lanes than to the fact that the Blue Line will bypass five miles of Washington Street that Route 8 currently serves. Ms. Pyrz neglected to mention those facts.
Also omitted was the necessary context for her statement that “these three rapid-transit lines are going to work together to make the whole system really what we promised.” IndyGo’s story has been that an interconnected grid will result when the east-west-oriented Purple and Blue Lines intersect the north-south-oriented Red Line. But Routes 39 and 8, which the Purple and Blue Lines will replace, intersect the Red Line already. On average, moreover, their stops aren’t as far to walk to as those of the BRT routes that will replace them. And we saw above that IndyGo’s non-BRT routes are nearly as fast as its existing BRT route if not faster. (In fact, Federal Transit Administration data imply that non-BRT routes’ national-average speed is 1.8 mph greater than BRT routes’.)
Ms. Pyrz similarly omitted context by failing to mention, when she said the Red Line had over a million riders last year, that this ridership is less than 30% of the ridership IndyGo had promised transit-tax-referendum voters. Nor did she mention the economic pressure stirred up by a City-County Councilor against support for a dedicated-lane moratorium when she instead attributed subsequent withdrawal of such support to “open, honest conversations.” (We’re entitled to doubt that those “conversations” were any more honest than her interview answers.)
After all this misinformation it’s perhaps a minor matter that Ms. Pyrz characterized IndyGo as “doing great.” But it merits comment that the term great is a curious descriptor for having had so few riders last year that IndyGo would still have had 40% of its operating budget and 100% of its capital budget left over if instead of running a bus company it had just paid to send all those riders by cab.
As a municipal corporation that in 2022 received 97% of its revenue from taxes, IndyGo’s goal should be optimizing the benefit it affords the populace as a whole. And by that measure IndyGo is hardly “doing great” when a Franklin Township handyman could have filled his kid’s lunchbox for over a week for what he pays in local taxes to subsidize just a single IndyGo ride. Or when the tax money IndyGo received in 2022 was enough to buy three times as many passenger-miles by cab as IndyGo provided by bus and van.
Measured from IndyGo employees’ point of view, though, maybe IndyGo is indeed “doing great,” and its employees’ lack of candor serves to help this continue. The title of this post obviously comes from George Orwell, but invoking James Buchanan may be more appropriate in light what it’s intended to express: the likely motivation for IndyGo’s misinformation. Specifically, the public’s ignorance is IndyGo employees’ strength: the more IndyGo prevents the public from hearing facts like those we’ve provided here, the more likely it is that employment will grow at IndyGo. Viewed in this light Ms. Pyrz’s lack of candor is unsurprising but no less lamentable.
Democracy suffers when money extracted from taxpayers is used to fund their being misinformed by people like Ms. Pyrz. So the way the interview ended had its ironies. In thanking Ms. Pyrz, Indy Politics’s Abdul-Hakim Shabazz said that it’s “always good to get the information out so folks can have an informed decision when they make their votes.”
If only.