Introduction
“Two Minutes Becomes Fifty-Six” and “17,000 Vehicles per Day” both dealt with the Indianapolis Star’s misinformation campaign against Indiana Senate Bill 52 (“SB52”). That bill would have prohibited the Indianapolis Public Transit Corporation (“IndyGo”) from appropriating Washington Street lanes to exclusive use by IndyGo’s Blue Line. SB52 already appeared dead by the time the Sunday Star published its front-page, above-the-fold article entitled “Do bus-only lanes make sense in Indy?” But in that article the Star persisted in its campaign. So this post will use it as an example of how the press misleads by omission.
The Blue Line
The Blue Line would be the third of three IndyGo bus routes, called bus-rapid-transit (“BRT”) lines, that will use dedicated lanes. The other two are the Red Line, which has been in operation for over four years, and the Purple Line, which is scheduled to begin operation later this year. The Blue Line will run between Cumberland in the east and the Indianapolis International Airport in the west, predominantly following Indianapolis’s Washington Street but taking the Interstate from Holt Road to the airport.
Ideology over Evidence?
The Star article in question emphasized the importance of a “transit corridor from the airport to downtown Indianapolis” but also discussed IndyGo’s experience with dedicated lanes so far and how they might promote development. It preceded those topics with the contention that the choice of whether dedicated lanes are worth it “may be based less on evidence and more on ideology” and followed them with the following passage:
The debate here is ultimately a policy choice between prioritizing the efficiency of bus travel versus the efficiency of car travel, said Yonah Freemark, a lead researcher at Urban Institute, a D.C. based think tank.
“The fundamental point here is that, in my view, this is not really a debate about evidence; this is a debate about preference for transportation types,” he said. “It’s sort of an ideological debate; it’s not one that’s gonna be resolved by better evidence, unfortunately.”
Omitted from the intervening discussion was evidence from which a reader might have concluded that on the contrary at least some of the opposition to dedicated lanes stems from a desire to maximize streets’ utility to residents generally, without regard to their transportation preferences. As a result, it invited the impression that those who oppose dedicated lanes are the ones who are impervious to evidence.
A Nod to Balance
That’s not to say the article made no nod toward balance. Beyond its observation that “Sen. Aaron Freeman, R-Indianapolis, has wanted for years to ban dedicated bus lanes on Washington Street, contending the Blue Line project can become a reality without them,” it did mention one resident’s bad experience with the Red Line:
Scott Goodwine, former longtime owner of the College Arms apartments, blames Red Line construction for the loss of one retail tenant. Merchants permanently lost some parking spots, which affects customers who drive cars.
Additionally, left turn lane restrictions mean motorists can’t easily maneuver in and out of parking lots without circling neighborhood blocks, Goodwine said. That has created more traffic on side streets, something drivers in the area have noticed, he said.
“They’ve learned to live with it, but it’s not as easy as it was before,” he said.
And, after stating that “the Indy Chamber, along with Develop Indy and the nonprofit Midtown Indy, have tabulated the estimated economic impact of the Red, Purple and future Blue lines [to be] $1.3 billion,” it admitted that this is “not to say every developer chose those sites solely because of the transit lines or that they leave without them.”
Development
But the Star provided no context by which readers could judge how credible passages like the following are:
Jeremy Stephenson, founder of 1820 Ventures, plans to further develop the Elevator Hill campus off Washington Street near downtown no matter the outcome of the Blue Line, but the scope of his project will depend on whether dedicated lanes become a reality. Efficient transit in the neighborhood would reduce the need to include as much parking in his future multi-family buildings, transforming them from, hypothetically, 150-unit buildings to [450-unit] buildings.
It didn’t mention, for example, that Blue Line buses won’t come to that location any more frequently than Route 8 buses already do. Washington Street in that neighborhood already has sidewalks, its lanes may already be as narrow as “road diet” proponents think will discourage speeding, and the Blue Line stop would be farther away than the Route 8 stop. We’ll see below, moreover, that if the Red Line is any indication the Blue Line won’t be significantly faster or more reliable than Route 8.
Of course, we don’t know for sure that the Blue Line’s performance will be as bad as the Red Line’s, and backers can be relied upon to argue that without the Blue Line the street and sidewalks near that development still won’t be up to snuff. But having the foregoing information would have given readers a basis for questioning whether dedicated lanes could really improve the neighborhood’s transit efficiency enough to justify a 200% increase in the project’s number of apartments.
The Airport
The article emphasized the Blue Line’s providing visitors fast, affordable transportation from the airport:
Visitors and convention hopefuls looking at Indianapolis often ask Chris Gahl, executive vice president of Visit Indy, How easy is it to get from the airport to downtown without spending $40 on a rideshare app?
Today, visitors could take the Route 8, a regular city bus that leaves from the airport every half hour and takes 40 minutes to get to the downtown transit center roughly 15 miles away.
Meanwhile, visitors to a peer city like Denver can take a dedicated rail line downtown, a longer journey in less time.
And it’s true that the 37 mph implied by the 37 minutes Denver’s A Line takes for its 23-mile trip greatly exceeds the 20–23 mph implied by the 36–42 minutes Route 8 can take for its 14-mile trip. Moreover, the Star deserves credit for not repeating the claim found in its previous article that Route 8 takes an hour and 21 minutes.
But the Star failed to mention that Route 8’s 20–23 mph is only a little less than the 24 mph implied by the 35 minutes IndyGo’s CEO recently predicted for the Blue Line. Or that much of the travel-time advantage visitors may enjoy on the Blue Line will result from bypassing most of the West Washington Street locations from which Route 8 currently provides local residents access to airport-area jobs. (The Blue Line will provide service along only 3.8 of the 9.2 miles of West Washington Street that Route 8 does.)
Perhaps more important in the context of how great the need is for bus service from the airport, the Star failed to mention that IndyGo’s Green Line hadn’t needed dedicated lanes to exceed the A Line’s speed. The Green Line, which apparently began operation in the fall of 2007, ran downtown from the airport every 20 minutes and cost $7. Its schedule said it traveled the 13 miles from the airport to the Downtown Convention Center in 20 minutes, which would imply 39 mph. From there it made a 20-minute circuit of downtown hotels before returning to the airport.
We hasten to add that the Green Line didn’t serve even the remaining 3.8 miles of West Washington that the Blue Line will, so its shorter travel time doesn’t mean that dedicated lanes afford no speed advantage at all. But IndyGo chose to stop running the Green Line in 2012, when the federal grant dedicated to it ran out. And, although IndyGo handed the service off to an operator that according to a 2016 Star report was managing to turn a profit at $10 per ride on a half-hour schedule, that shuttle is no longer operating. Such information would have helped readers decide whether there’s as much demand for airport bus service as the article may have led them to believe.
“Studies”
Also misleading was the Star’s statement that “Studies overwhelmingly conclude that dedicated bus lanes improve travel times for bus riders.” Now, it should be easy for a study to find claims by transit agencies that their dedicated lanes afford travel-time advantages. And, although our experience with IndyGo gives us reservations about transit agencies’ candor, some of those claims may actually be true; everything else being equal, it makes perfect sense that dedicated lanes would improve travel time to some extent. But making bus-only lanes doesn’t always leave everything else equal. And we have reason to believe that the Star’s statement was based on only a single survey of transit agencies, which used inconsistent definitions.
If we instead consider the big picture, dividing “vehicle revenue miles” by “vehicle revenue hours” in FTA data for the whole country, we find that nationwide the bus services classified as BRTs are actually slower on average than those that aren’t. This doesn’t prove that dedicated lanes provide no speed benefit at all; no doubt there are confounding factors. But having that information would have helped readers judge whether the advantages of dedicated lanes are as self-evident as they may seem.
The Red Line
Most informative in that connection would probably have been IndyGo’s actual experience with its existing BRT route, the Red Line. But although the article included a section called “A case study in the Red Line” it sidestepped any travel-time comparison by regurgitating IndyGo’s statement that it “does not have data showing the change in travel time for bus riders pre- and post-Red Line because the route replaced [a] combination of many old bus routes.” Its “case study” instead consisted only of the following half-truth:
IndyGo does know how dedicated lanes impacted congestion and crashes along College Avenue and Meridian Street, the portion of the [north-south] route with bus-only lanes.
Looking at the years before and after the Red Line opened in 2019 — just before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic — engineering firm American Structurepoint found average car speeds increased between 2 and 5 miles per hour, an indication of less congestion. Overall, crashes on these corridors decreased by 40%.
As far as it goes, that passage is true. But it omits two of the cited study’s other findings, which “Beware of Studies” discussed in more detail.
Specifically, the Star didn’t mention the finding that similar speed increases also occurred on streets from which no lanes had been appropriated. If readers had been informed of this finding, they might logically have concluded that the reported speed increase can’t reliably be attributed to dedicated lanes.
Nor did the Star reveal the study’s finding that on the dedicated-lane streets the average number of crashes per million vehicles actually increased slightly. Yes, the total number of crashes on those streets decreased. But that’s only because lane appropriation left fewer cars on the dedicated-lane streets; there was no reduction in crash probability among the few cars that were left. For all we know, the dedicated lanes just diverted crashes to other streets.
And the fact that the Red Line replaced a combination of old routes doesn’t mean we can’t learn something from making comparisons. The Red Line’s northern, dedicated-lane segment replaced IndyGo’s College Avenue route, Route 17. That segment’s 33-minute Red Line trip between the Broad Ripple and Statehouse Red Line stops is roughly equivalent in length and termini to the Route 17 trip from Broad Ripple & Compton to Meridian & Ohio, which according to the Wayback Machine also took 33 minutes. This suggests that dedicated lanes didn’t provide much of an advantage. A similar conclusion is suggested by the fact that current-day Route 18 takes about 30 minutes to make the similarly equivalent trip from Broad Ripple & Carrollton to Capitol & Ohio.
So at least for that trip—which includes almost all of the Red Line’s dedicated lanes—the Red Line isn’t particularly fast. Nor, as the above plot from “Ignorance Is Strength” shows, is the Red Line generally very fast. And its on-time record shows that if anything it’s less reliable than routes that don’t use dedicated lanes.
The Star provided none of this context.
Overall Utility
Again, the bulk of the article was bracketed with the proposition that choices between dedicated lanes and mixed traffic may be based on ideology rather than evidence, that it’s “a debate about preference for transportation types.” Had the Star’s description of the Red Line study told the whole story, though, readers could have seen that at least some opposition to dedicated lanes is based instead on maximizing streets’ utility for the populace as a whole without regard to transportation preferences.
Specifically, readers could have inferred from dividing crash rates into total crashes that the number of vehicles on the streets whose lanes had been dedicated to buses had decreased by 40%. As “Do Dedicated Lanes Promote Development?” explained, the thereby-implied loss in the number of car passengers couldn’t have been made up for by greater bus ridership even if the Red Line’s current 3,000 riders per day were instead the 11,000 per day that IndyGo told referendum voters it would be. Such utilization penalties are the basis for the standard the Indianapolis Metropolitan Planning Organization’s Blue Line study used in rejecting dedicated lanes; unless ridership is much higher than is realistic in Indianapolis, dedicated lanes impair streets’ utility.
Conclusion
The Star omitted the evidence that was inconsistent with its theme that “the choice may be based less on evidence and more on ideology.” This tended to leave the impression that dedicated-lane opponents1 are impervious to evidence. Not only is such slanted reportage detrimental to the proper functioning of our democracy but it can also leave the reader with the feeling that the paper’s news coverage is all foam and no beer. The paper’s owner may want to reflect on how this may be affecting circulation.
Mistakenly “proponents” as originally posted.
Comments (previously sent to Freeman) I sent just before they bailed on the bill.
Representative Speedy:
I see that you, Rep. Julie McGuire and Rep. Bob Behning sponsored SB52 in the house. My initial elation that this bill came out of the House committee was dampened greatly by the prohibition on dedicated lanes being watered down to a basically one-year prohibition. As I indicated below when I sent the following e-mails to the Senate sponsors of the bill, I fully support the prohibition of dedicated lanes, which I hope would prevent INDYGO from implementing this boondoggle. I would request that the house change the bill back to at least a ten-year prohibition (a return to a permanent prohibition would be fantastic!). In that time frame, the disaster that is the Red Line (and the developing Purple Line) will be evident to all except the few who choose to ignore the reality, as the infrastructure issues and financial issues related to this scheme (including the use of heavy, expensive electric buses) becomes a full-scale crisis. Please share this e-mail with your co-sponsors (whose e-mails I did not find) and any other House representatives you wish. Thank you.
Part One:
As a bus rider, bike rider and former city planner (34 years of experience), I fully support your bill to prohibit dedicated bus lanes for the Blue Line. Planners who learn how to destroy cities and control people's lives in planning schools (I have a B.S. in Accounting and a M.A. in Geography and was a certified planner (AICP) for well over a decade) have been trying to micromanage where people live for decades and they believe that one of the ways to do this is to make driving so burdensome that people will ride their glorious transit lines (plus they like to brag to other planners in other cities that they have cool things too!). They use the excuse that they can get Federal money to fix other infrastructure along these transit corridors while at the same time expanding infrastructure that they will not be able to maintain. Make it make sense? In 10-15 years, when these transit stations are falling apart, they will be begging for funds to maintain all of this new infrastructure that is not needed. Should Indygo make some improvements to these transit corridors? Sure. But that improvement should consist of shelters where needed and bus pads and sidewalks (working with DPW) where substandard sidewalks exist. They do not need a dedicated bus lane. The Red Line is a joke (I've ridden it). It adds no real value. It is just a different bus (drivers barely give you enough time to get on and off the bus because they are trying to meet a faster schedule) that is more expensive, which suffers from more fareless riders and the same empty buses (almost every time I bike along that corridor I will see two buses back-to-back - which is a sign of too many buses and too few riders).
Removing lanes on Washington Street will be a disaster. They will want to argue that transit creates density and that density will improve the economic vitality of the corridor and use other cities as evidence - regardless of whether those cities are even remotely comparable. When they get desperate, they will trot out Washington D.C, Charlotte NC and even San Francisco and New York City as examples of transit successes as if Indianapolis is even remotely comparable (plus they are not successful by normal measurements - but are only successful by planning measures). San Francisco's land area is equivalent to Center Township and while the BART system connects to neighboring Oakland, by comparison no one rides it in Oakland and San Francisco ridership is boosted by tourism. Transit systems with reasonable ridership are in dense places. San Francisco is four times as dense as Center Township and nearly five times as dense as Indianapolis. In order for Indy to be of similar density (14, 298 people / sq. mile), Indianapolis would have to have nearly 5,200,000 people (The 2020 census had San Fran with 870,000 people but population projections indicate that have lost 200,000! people since 2020 - the 5.2 million figure is based on those projections). https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/san-francisco-ca-population How come the magic of transit has not prevented this decline? Other things are more important - like crime and housing costs. Even Detroit MI, whose population has declined by a million people in the last 90+ years is still 1.5 times more dense than Indianapolis! https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/detroit-mi-population. And no one is claiming that Detroit is a mecca of transit. Indianapolis has also lost population since the 2020 census according to projections despite any claims to the contrary. https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/indianapolis-in-population
The people that support these transit boondoggles benefit in some way (the riders benefit the least). The Washington Street bus has the most ridership, has sufficient bus frequency (buses arrive approx. every 15 minutes) and only needs supportive infrastructure for the riders; it doesn't need expensive transit stations or dedicated lanes that inhibit car and truck traffic and would require additional funding for maintenance which the government will steal from the public. Please believe that are more people out here who agree with you and not the Irvington residents (seemingly half or which are government employees) who will act like you are committing murder by trying to bring common sense to bear.
The truth is that none of these people ever ride them themselves. When they travel to other cities for Planning Conferences in places like San Francisco or Atlanta, do they take their light rail from the airport? No they don't, because it is too inconvenient. But they want everyone else to do what they won't do themselves.
So, please don't give up on this bill. We will all breathe easier when it passes. Every sensible person on the eastside is dreading the possibility of this permanent monument to stupidity being constructed on the eastside forever transforming this corridor - and not for the better.
Part Two:
Don't let the businesses cowering from the pressure of the Irvington residents prevent you from pressing forward with this bill. There is no justification for dedicated lanes anywhere in this city. When I lived in Pittsburgh, they had dedicated bus lanes downtown (Pittsburgh's downtown was very compact. They also had separate busways (using abandoned railroad tunnels for the southside busway). I rode the bus there and they kind of made sense for the bus riders, but they were terrible for the car drivers (driving in Pittsburgh is a nightmare in general). Those buses would have taken forever to get through downtown without dedicated lanes (and at the time (in the 1970's) they were full of riders - one of my co-riders was a non-English speaking Italian (we spoke to each other in nods and gestures) who was an independent restaurant owner downtown (grilled meatball, sausage and Italian hoagies, etc. - best I ever had). The point is the riders were different in those days (1980's). I doubt you would find many restaurant owners riding the bus. There was much lower car ownership among young people starting out in the workplace and the demographics of bus riders was more consistently varied.
They built the busways in Pittsburgh to allow the buses to be express-like for several miles (there were a couple of stops with rare pick-ups and drop-offs until the bus got to the suburbs they were serving. At our apartment complex (the restaurant owner (he wasn't rich - he was making a living and employed people) lived in the same complex) in the suburbs, the parking lots were largely empty (seems bizarre to think about it now). They built the busways to keep the buses off the main arterials so the buses would have shorter times and to limit congestion on the main streets. While they served a purpose, they were very expensive - and ridership, of course has declined there with the decline in the city's population. And, of course, like everywhere else they have severe budget problems and difficulty maintaining infrastructure.
A blogger's input:
https://naptownnumbers.substack.com/p/17000-vehicles-per-day
Part Three:
Dedicated bus lanes and transit stations in the middle of the street somehow make the streets safer - that obviously makes no sense. Let's put everyone waiting for a bus standing, sitting and waiting in the middle of the street (forcing everyone to cross the street no matter what direction they are coming from) and the pretend safety is being enhanced.
The dedicated lanes don't add much speed to the route. They gain speed from having fewer stops, meaning that this proposal discriminates against the disabled, blind and aged who have to walk further (or wheel themselves) in many cases to get to a bus stop (and forced to cross the street). Make it make sense. This proposal is a boondoggle that will hamper traffic flow and create more conflicts between pedestrians and traffic, not less. Additionally, they try to create speed on these "rapid transit" routes by speeding away from the stops before people can sit down, rack their bikes (one of the few times I rode the Red Line I almost fell over while trying to lift by bike onto their hanging racks) or grab a standing strap, again creating dangers for the disabled, blind and aged. These people proposing this need to be held to account.
The goal of BRT is the elimination of cars; to turn travel from a private activity into a government activity. From wikipedia, "A 2005 study of media bias in The Quarterly Journal of Economics ranked UI [Urban Institute] as the 11th most liberal of the 50 most-cited think tanks and policy groups, placing it between the NAACP and the People for Ethical Treatment of Animals."