Introduction
This is a follow-up to three previous posts about the Indianapolis Public Transit Corporation (“IndyGo”). Those posts presented questions to which candid answers in a public forum could have revealed how poorly IndyGo performs. It now turns out that a public meeting occurred in which some of those questions were actually asked.
In truth, few were answered with anything like candor. But the fact that they were asked at all in the April 5, 2023, meeting of the Indianapolis City-County Council Metropolitan Corporations Committee is faintly heartening. And the lengths to which IndyGo went to avoid responsive answers may be interesting to students of public-choice theory.
Red Line Ridership
A particularly notable evasion occurred in response to a question about ridership on IndyGo’s Red Line. In a 2016 referendum Indianapolis voters approved a 0.25% transit income tax after a massive campaign in which IndyGo told them that the tax’s approval would result in a 70% “service” increase. The Red Line would be the first of three bus rapid transit (“BRT”) lines that were to provide part of the increase, and in the run-up to that referendum IndyGo said Red Line ridership was expected to average 11,000 trips per day.
IndyGo CEO Inez Evans admitted in the Committee’s September 2022 meeting that after three years of operation Red Line ridership still hadn’t reached the 11,000 level. But she claimed that ridership had increased by 30%1 over the previous year. Of course, citing a 30% increase revealed nothing about how great the shortfall was. And when Councilor Brian Mowery pointed this out Ms. Evans claimed she didn’t know the answer.
That was a remarkable response. The Red Line is IndyGo’s flagship route, and its ridership shortfall had been the subject of considerable controversy. How could IndyGo’s CEO have failed to anticipate that such a question would be asked? Not only did she evade the question in the September meeting, moreover, but she also repeated the evasion six months later, at the Committee’s March 2023 meeting. As we reported in “Another IndyGo Stiff-Arm,” in fact, she reported no percentage in that meeting at all.
So she was invited back for the Committee’s April meeting in the hope that she would be more forthcoming. This visit proved to be an all-hands operation. Not only did Ms. Evans and her administrative assistant attend but so did IndyGo operations, government affairs, communications, and other personnel. And people from Indy Chamber and the Metropolitan Planning Organization came to back her up. There must have been a score of IndyGo employees and supporters in attendance. Even IndyGo’s vacationing CFO sent in comments, apparently having monitored the meeting remotely.
The only thing missing? The same thing that had been missing from both previous meetings: a clear statement that Red Line ridership is only about 25% of the projected 11,000.
Strictly speaking, there were numbers in what Ms. Evans brought this time that a quick-thinking attendee could have calculated that percentage from. From yearly totals that she showed for 2019 through 2022 an attendee who whipped his calculator out before the slide changed could have obtained the answer by dividing those numbers by the numbers of days in those years and the 11,000-daily-trip projection.
But she didn’t present the information in a way designed to inform the public that Red Line ridership is only about a quarter of the predicted level. Here’s what she said instead:
[S]hifting gears to 2022 and we have seen a significant growth in ridership. That trend is continuing in 2023. So we broke it down in a graph. So if we’re pulling out those numbers from 2021 to 2022 for a closer look, you can see that ridership is coming back at a steady pace on the Red Line. These numbers represent a 13% increase from 2021 to 2022, and they continue to trend up in 2023.
Two data points. That’s all she graphed. That’s how she demonstrated that “ridership is coming back at a steady pace.” Even though she’d had since the previous September to hone her answer. She didn’t even scale those annual numbers to daily ridership so that the public could easily compare them with the predicted 11,000. The only percentages she gave, moreover, were of the year-over-year type she’d been told at the September meeting were non-responsive.
The plot above does that scaling, depicting her two data points as the ends of that heavy black line segment and comparing them with the prediction. It also overlays monthly results to show that whether “you can see that ridership is coming back at a steady pace on the Red Line” and that the numbers “continue to trend up in 2023” is a matter of opinion. Ms. Evans provided the public no opportunity to form an opinion on its own.
The Prediction
As she had frequently done before, moreover, Ms. Evans disputed what IndyGo’s 11,000-trip prediction had actually meant to voters. Here’s how she put it:
It’s important to remember that any previous projections regarding ridership be taken into account that it was considering the entire network. That means the Red, Purple, Blue Line plus the grid network would need to be in effect. That is currently not the case and won’t be for some time.
But nothing in IndyGo’s referendum-campaign materials would have warned readers that the projected ridership wouldn’t be realized until such time, if ever, as the other BRTs were all up and running and service on other routes, too, had all increased to the intended level.
Instead, here is what voters saw on IndyGo’s Web site before the referendum and for several years thereafter:
If IndyGo had wanted referendum voters to understand that the Red Line’s ridership wouldn't reach 11,000 until after all three BRTs were in operation and service had increased by 70%, it chose a singularly ineffective way of conveying that message.
Now, one week before the Red Line began operation IndyGo's messaging had apparently changed—but only slightly. The Indianapolis Business Journal reported that “daily ridership along what will be the Red Line corridor is now about 6,500, and IndyGo is projecting that will increase to about 11,000 by the end of the Red Line’s first year.” So IndyGo had started to say that reaching the projected value would take a year.
But this was nearly three years after residents had already voted. And IndyGo still wasn’t saying that the projection was contingent upon the other BRT lines.
Service
“Since the referendum how has IndyGo service increased?” Posed by Mr. Mowery, this question was another that went to the heart of the matter. The overall goal to be achieved by the transit tax was a 70% increase in “service.” Now, a careful observer of IndyGo’s transit-tax campaign would probably have concluded that by service IndyGo had meant buses on the streets more often than it had meant riders in the seats. But by the former measure service is up only 12% over the referendum year’s.
So Ms. Evans used the latter; she replied that “on January and February of this year compared to January and February of 2022 overall system-wide ridership is up 25%.” Not only did she thus treat service as meaning riders in the seats but she also switched the time interval from “since the referendum” to “compared to January and February of 2022” so instead of having fallen by 38% she could say it had risen by 25%.
Service was treated differently when Councilor Joshua Bain asked, “You said the original intent—was it of the Red Line specifically or the BRT—was to increase ridership within the grid 70%?” Although Ms. Evans didn’t initially dispute Mr. Bain’s riders-in-the-seats interpretation in answering that the 70% figure applied to the entire network, she handed the question off to IndyGo’s COO Aaron Vogel, and he switched to the buses-on-the-streets interpretation:
We’re 40% into that plan. We went from 500,000 revenue vehicle hours. Pre-COVID we were up to 700,000 revenue vehicle hours. We have since scaled back a little bit due to hiring concerns and with COVID and we’re delivering about 650,000 revenue vehicle hours.
Since the buses-on-the-streets interpretation is the one on which less-casual referendum voters would probably have settled, it was probably reasonable for Mr. Vogel to choose it. Unfortunately, though, his response (“We’re 40% into that plan”) likely created the impression that the current service level represents 40% of the 70% increase, i.e., that 28% more buses are on the streets now than in the referendum year.
But that impression would be incorrect, at least according to Federal Transit Administration records. On IndyGo’s regular, fixed-route system, the increase is only 12%, and instead of 650,000 revenue hours the service for the last twelve months has been 582,000.
Now, that number would have been 662,000 if we’d included the door-to-door van service that IndyGo operates for qualified riders. But on that basis IndyGo service would show no increase at all; indeed, total service would actually be lower than in the referendum year. So the impression Mr. Vogel likely created was false.
What would have been more accurate for him to say is that for a few months in 2019 and 2020 IndyGo’s fixed-route service reached levels that if sustained over twelve months would have totaled 28% more than the referendum-year value and thereby made the increase 40% of the 70% goal. But no twelve-month period reached that level. Again, moreover, the current level represents only a 12% service-level increase, which is only 18% of the way toward the goal of 70%. That’s not the impression that Mr. Vogel left.
How Many Residents Ride?
Ms. Evans ducked another important question when Mr. Mowery asked, “Do you have any rough idea of what percentage of residents are riding IndyGo?” A city-bus-company CEO would have to be remarkably incurious not to have at least a rough idea of that percentage, but her reply was “I do not,” and she confirmed his conclusion that she similarly had no idea of how many low-income residents are bus riders.
No one knows the exact figure, of course, but lacking exact figures hasn’t stopped IndyGo from making claims about things like, say, how much Indianapolis development IndyGo has caused. And a good approximation can be made by comparing ridership with the answers to IndyGo’s on-board-survey questions about how frequently the surveyed passengers ride the bus and how many buses their trips take.
Even if no one at IndyGo had bestirred himself to make that approximation, moreover, it could not have escaped the IndyGo communications department’s attention that in 2017 IUPUI’s Polis Center had inferred from IndyGo data that only 26,000 residents took the bus even once a year and that only half of those took it to work every day. Since IndyGo’s ridership at the time was 60% greater than it is now, a rough estimate would be that less than 2% of Marion County residents take the bus even once a year, and probably less than a percent ride it to work every day.
Yet IndyGo’s communications director, Carrie Black, professed no knowledge of such estimates. All she offered at the meeting were results from last year’s on-board survey (which still hasn’t made it onto IndyGo’s Web site), such as that about 72% of IndyGo riders have family incomes below $35,000. Given this percentage and the fact that the Indianapolis poverty rate is 15.1%, the Polis Center’s results suggest that even among residents living in poverty more than nine out of every ten never take the bus. But this is something the communications director didn’t communicate.
Economic Development
Ms. Evans was also asked what hard evidence IndyGo has that most of the development IndyGo takes credit for wouldn’t have occurred somewhere in Indianapolis anyway. Despite the month IndyGo had for preparation it brought nothing but some testimonials to support the following assertion:
That is, booster organizations like Midtown Indy, Indy Chamber, and Develop Indy say that although almost no one rides Indianapolis city buses they’re responsible for billions in development.
The Indy Chamber representative claimed that a store had cited the BRT as an “integral reason of why they’re locating there,” but he provided no evidence that the store wouldn’t have located somewhere in Indianapolis anyway. And to the extent that subsidized-bus stops do affect where development occurs he provided no evidence that IndyGo doesn’t thereby adversely affect districts that don’t have stops. Nor did he attempt to prove that the taxes paid to subsidize IndyGo don’t drive more people to the doughnut counties than city buses attract into Marion County. And remember that Indy Chamber was the organization that told residents that employers would step up to meet a statutory 10% requirement for voluntary contributions.
As to actual hard evidence, all IndyGo and its backers provided were promises to email councilors information outside of public view.
Taxes Aren’t Taxes
Despite all the evasion, a couple of facts did come through, although no one at the meeting betrayed any sign of appreciating their implications.
One had to do with a statutory provision that 10% of IndyGo’s operating expenditures have to be provided by sources other than taxes and fares. This had been envisioned as a way to avoid actually imposing another tax but still require financial support from the employers who had lobbied for the subsidy increase. Despite what IndyChamber predicted at the time, however, the foundation that was established to collect such contributions reported having received only $1.4 million.
Ms. Evans contended that the 10% requirement had nonetheless been met. Her reasoning? State and federal taxes provide more than 10% of the operating budget, and “as per the Board of Accounts for the State of Indiana federal taxes and state taxes are not considered taxes [under?] they’re considered grants.” So the meeting did reveal that sources other than fares and taxes have fallen short of the statutory 10% and that the fig leaf IndyGo covers that shortfall with is a bureaucrat’s statement that taxes aren’t taxes if the state or federal government collects them.
Cost per Ride
The meeting also revealed that the IndyGo’s cost of providing bus rides far exceeds those rides’ worth to the riders. This revelation actually resulted from a moment of candor. Well, at least of relative candor; no one actually admitted explicitly that IndyGo rides cost too much to provide. But a reasonable statement of that quantity’s magnitude came after Mr. Mowery asked what IndyGo’s overall cost per rider is.
Although Ms. Evans initially expressed surprise at the question and declined to answer, IndyGo’s vacationing CFO, Bart Brown, apparently texted a response, which she reported as follows:
Prior to 2019 our cost per rider was $18, in 2022 it was $40, with all the riders coming back the cost is going down, because more riders are riding, and in 2023 it is projected that the cost per rider will be $23.
These amounts presumably encompass operating expenditures only, since that $23 figure is close to the $22 estimate we made for 2023 operating expenditures per ride—together with a $45 estimate for total budget per ride. Here we’ll set aside our belief that the way in which IndyGo presents its operating budget tends to understate the cost, and we’ll just consider Mr. Brown’s pre-pandemic value, $18. Even though that’s the lowest one he gave, it still demonstrates that IndyGo bus rides cost more than they’re worth.
Specifically, IndyGo rides’ 4.5-mile average length translates the per-ride cost to $4 per passenger-mile. Almost no one would pay that much for a city-bus ride even if he could afford to. For one thing, all but the shortest cab rides would cost less than that much per mile. For another, quite a few IndyGo trips wouldn’t be worth taking if they weren’t so heavily subsidized.
Now, with the possible exception of a couple of councilors, the meeting appeared to be attended only by transit-subsidy proponents, so such implications were probably lost on them. But it would have been helpful to any numerate viewers of the meeting video, so the question was worthwhile to ask.
Conclusion
In a sense that meeting was dispiriting. Unless attendees were particularly alert they still wouldn’t have known, even after the question had been asked in three successive meetings, that the Red Line ridership is only 25% of what had been predicted. And the discussions would have informed no one who hadn’t already known that less than 1% of residents take the bus to work every day.
Viewers also wouldn’t have learned that IndyGo’s BRT buses are less reliable and barely faster than other buses, that they’re much more accident-prone, or that their dedicated lanes cost motorists more time than they save riders. Nor would they have been told that the Red Line has turned out to require buying many more buses than would have been required if it had used conventional diesel buses instead of electric, whereas the pre-referendum propaganda claimed the Red Line would need fewer. So it’s hard to see much truth in Committee chairman Monroe Gray’s concluding remarks that councilors had been “enlightened” and could “go back to the community with the true story.”
At the same time, veteran observers may be able to find some encouragement in the fact that questions of such relevance were asked at all and perhaps cherish the hope that future IndyGo hearings will have more balance.
That value was false, and Ms. Evans’ explanation for the falsehood is hard to square with IndyGo records. But it’s a minor point, so we won’t discuss it here.