Introduction
The Indianapolis Public Transportation Corporation (“IndyGo”) has disseminated a “pocket guide” apparently intended to convince the public that “transit is essential” in Indianapolis. But the pocket guide omits some important context. Our previous post presented questions whose candid answers at, say, the Indianapolis City-County Council Municipal Corporations Committee’s April 5, 2023, meeting would help give the public a more-complete picture.
In this post we present further questions, but unlike the more-general ones in the previous post these will largely focus on IndyGo’s Red Line. The Red Line is the first of three bus-rapid-transit (“BRT”) lines that a 0.25% transit income tax on Indianapolis residents has made possible.
The transit tax was approved in a 2016 referendum after IndyGo told voters that the BRT lines’ dedicated lanes would make those lines faster and more reliable than conventional bus routes. And after three and a half years of Red Line operation IndyGo’s Web site says the Red Line is now “a proven standard for how to plan, design, develop and build an innovative bus rapid transit line that has reimagined infrastructure, amenities and future-ready vehicles.”
Non-evasive answers to the questions below would help shed light on whether the impression conveyed by that characterization is accurate .
The Questions
How Has Red Line Ridership Compared with IndyGo’s Pre-Referendum Prediction?
When IndyGo was lobbying for the transit tax it “conservatively” predicted that Red Line ridership would start out averaging 11,000 per day and increase from there. IndyGo CEO Inez Evans’ evasive answer in last month’s meeting to a question about how well IndyGo has lived up to that prediction may be what prompted the request that she return for the April meeting.
As we observed in another post, the answer should have been straightforward. Even before the pandemic the Red Line’s monthly-average paid ridership never reached even half the 11,000-per-day prediction. And in 2022 the Red Line’s ridership averaged less than a quarter of the predicted level. Even if we ignore weekends it probably averaged less than a third.
Perhaps IndyGo’s communications effort would be better spent on hard facts like the plot above instead of the fluff it’s currently being expended on.
Won’t the Purple Line Take Ridership from the Red Line?
IndyGo’s other two BRT lines will be known as the Purple and Blue Lines, and when the Purple Line enters service in late 2024 it will probably reclaim ridership the Red Line poached from the Purple Line’s predecessors.
With prominent stations and millions’ worth of publicity, the Red Line cannibalized ridership from the rest of IndyGo’s fixed-route system. This was particularly true of Route 39, which runs parallel to the Red Line south of 38th Street; that route’s fraction of IndyGo’s total ridership has fallen by nearly 25%.
The Purple Line will not only replace Route 39 but also coincide with the Red Line south of 38th Street. Since the Purple Line stations will be just as prominent as the Red Line’s—and since the two lines will share stations south of 38th—the Purple Line will probably claw back some of the ridership the Red Line took from Route 39.
So we should not be surprised if after a modest increase the Red Line’s ridership decreases when the Purple Line begins operation.
How Full Are Red Line Buses?
Residents frequently say that Red Line buses always seem empty. Appearances aren’t far from reality. Federal Transit Administration (“FTA”) data say that in 2021 Red Line buses traveled 663,676 miles to provide 3,135,935 passenger-miles. Those values’ quotient is an average of 4.7 passengers per bus. That was hardly a creditable performance. Still, it was better than the 2.8 passengers (22,174,704 passenger-miles ÷ 8,111,415 bus-miles) posted by IndyGo’s fixed-route system as a whole.
Perhaps Ms. Evans can tell the public what those averages were in 2022. We’re guessing they were something like 4.9 for the Red Line and 3.1 for the fixed-route system as a whole.
Transit-subsidy proponents seem to think that asking this question betrays ignorance of the need for buses to run relatively empty in some stretches in order to accommodate greater occupancy in others. On the contrary, it reflects a recognition that city-bus transportation is inherently inefficient in cities where that need prevails.
Defenders of low bus occupancy all too often apply a double standard. They are wont to decry as grotesquely outsized some of the pick-up trucks commonly seen on the streets. If we assume an urban-average car occupancy of 1.25 for an 8000-pound 4×4 Ford F‑450 Super Duty with dual rear wheels, though, the weight-to-passenger ratio of a 53,000-pound Red Line bus averaging 4.9 passengers is 1.7 times the F-450’s.
How Much Faster Is the Red Line than Non-BRT Routes?
The Red Line replaced conventional Routes 17 and 22. Four months before the Red Line’s inauguration IndyGo route schedules said that the trip from Haverford & Broad Ripple to the Transit Center on Route 17 took 34 minutes (8:31 AM to 9:05 AM), while that from the Transit Center to UIndy on Route 22 took 20 minutes (9:30 AM to 9:50 AM). That’s a total of 54 minutes—the same duration that Google Maps gave at 7:30 AM on March 30, 2023, for a Red Line trip from 66th & College to UIndy. (And at 8:15 AM on that day the predicted duration was 72 minutes.)
Now, 2022 data do suggest that dedicated lanes afford a slight advantage. In that year Red Line buses traveled 715,898 miles in 51,507 hours for an average speed of 13.9 mph, while the rest of the system’s buses traveled 7,177,963 miles in 530,453 hours for an average speed of 13.5 mph. But that speed difference would mean a savings of only about 25 seconds in a Red-Line-average 16-minute trip.
Referendum voters were probably expecting a rather larger time savings.
How Much More Reliable Is the Red Line than the Rest of the System?
The correct answer seems to be that the Red Line is actually less reliable. In most months the Red Line’s on-time percentage was lower than the other routes’.1 In August, in fact, its on-time percentage was 43%, whereas the other routes’ was 78%. So the time Red Line riders lost in waiting for the bus may well have exceeded the time the Red Line saved them by appropriating travel lanes from motorists.
When Will the Red Line Master North/South Coordination on College Avenue?
A controversy arose in the middle of the last decade over the siting of the Red Line’s northern portion: whether it should be located on College Avenue or placed instead on Keystone Avenue. Keystone is wider and would therefore have left more lanes for motorists after IndyGo appropriated two. But possibly because the College Avenue bus had half again the Keystone Avenue bus’s ridership IndyGo chose College Avenue instead, claiming that on College the Red Line’s north- and south-bound buses could share a single dedicated lane by passing one another only where the single lane forks into two around the middle-of-the-street stations.
Even after more than three years of practice, though, IndyGo seems not to have mastered this maneuver. As a consequence, Red Line buses travel not only in the dedicated lane but also in the only lanes left to motorists.
Does IndyGo have any plans to stay in its lane?
Why Is the Red Line So Accident-Prone?
According to IndyGo’s board reports2 the Red Line had 6.86 “preventable accidents” per 100,000 vehicle revenue miles in 2022: three times the other fixed routes’ 2.25. For street and road vehicles generally the National Safety Council says 11.32 million crashes occurred nationally in 2020, when 3.28 trillion vehicle miles were driven. That’s 0.35 crashes per 100,000 miles. Without examining the exact methodologies used to arrive at those numbers, of course, we can’t know for sure how valid this comparison is. But at first blush the Red Line’s accident rate seems to be almost twenty times most vehicles’.
And that 6.86 value for the Red Line includes only accidents that IndyGo classified as “preventable,” i.e., only those that “the driver in question failed to exercise every reasonable precaution to prevent.” Over the past three years, in which the Red Line traveled 2.2 million miles, it had 603 collisions3 in which the bus sustained damage. That works out to 27 collisions per 100,000 miles: on average such a Red Line collision occurs more often than every other day. For comparison, a Forbes report stated that in 2020 there were 5,250,837 vehicle collisions nationally that caused property damage, injury, or death: 0.16 collisions per 100 thousand vehicle miles. The Red Line’s rate, in other words, was 450 times the national average over all vehicles.
Of course, city buses’ relatively low average speed probably keeps the resultant personal-injury rate relatively low. As transit expert Randal O’Toole observed, FTA reports show that between 2011 and 2019 only about 275 people per year were killed in transit-related accidents. Compared with the 17,500 people killed per year in urban traffic accidents generally, that seems like a drop in a bucket.
But “Americans traveled an average of 55 billion passenger-miles a year by urban transit, while they traveled 3.6 trillion passenger-miles a year by motor vehicles on urban roads and streets,” he wrote, so “transit accidents killed an average of 5.0 people per billion passenger-miles while urban traffic accidents killed 4.9 people per billion.” Given the Red Line’s high rate of collisions, we are justified in fearing that the Red Line will prove more deadly than cars.
How Much Electricity Did IndyGo Use Last Year to Charge Red Line Buses?
It would be helpful for the taxpayers who are subsidizing IndyGo to know how much electricity the Red Line used and how far its buses have traveled on that electricity. Naptown Numbers has yet to locate any reports IndyGo may make of its buses’ electricity consumption.
What we have found is that IndyGo routinely tells its board of directors how much electricity its solar panels have generated, and it has implied a relationship between their performance and the Red Line’s. As we’ve explained elsewhere, though, the emissions reduction afforded by the solar panels is independent of whether electric buses are running. Conversely, more electric-bus travel requires more electricity generation—which in Indianapolis means more fossil-fuel combustion—independently of whether the solar panels are generating electricity. In the Red Line context the solar panels are a red herring.
Yes, electric buses cause less carbon-dioxide emission than diesel buses do. And perhaps the Red Line does indeed cause less carbon dioxide to be emitted per passenger-mile than cars do. If it does, though, the difference isn’t very great.
Consider in that connection the implications of the 3.8 kilowatt-hours per mile we’ll later see the Red Line may consume in sub-zero weather. If the power company has to emit about a pound of carbon dioxide in order to deliver a kilowatt-hour of electricity to the socket, and if bus-battery charging is 90% efficient, then at 3.8 kWh/mi Red Line buses averaging 4.9 passengers per bus would cause 0.78 pound of carbon dioxide to be emitted per passenger-mile. Since gasoline combustion emits 19.6 pounds per gallon, a 24-mpg car that averages 1.25 occupants emits only 0.65 pound per passenger-mile. Even if the Red Line’s consumption rate averages more like 2.5 kWh/mi, the resultant 0.56 pound per passenger-mile still exceeds the 0.39 pound per passenger-mile that a 40-mpg Honda CR-V hybrid emits.
Of course, diesel buses emit their carbon dioxide at street level instead of from a power plant’s smokestack. But few people on the street are likely to inhale more carbon dioxide because of diesel buses than other attendees’ exhaling would cause them to inhale at an indoor party. And it wouldn’t harm them if they did. As we’ve explained elsewhere, moreover, electric buses don’t avoid enough global warming to justify their added cost.
True, carbon dioxide isn’t the only substance that diesel buses emit. But IndyGo hasn’t proved that avoiding what little emissions remain after decades of reductions is worth the added expense. For all we know, the greater non-exhaust emissions that electric buses produce simply because they’re extra heavy will offset whatever exhaust emissions they avoid.
How Many Miles Did IndyGo’s Non-BRT Electric Buses Travel, and How Much Electricity Did That Require?
IndyGo recently reported that it has twelve electric buses beyond those it uses for the Red Line. Presumably these are forty-foot models and therefore get better electricity mileage than those articulated sixty-foot buses do that the Red Line uses. Also presumably, though, they have range problems. Providing statistics on those buses’ performance would give taxpayers a better sense of how realistic IndyGo’s plan is for conversion to an all-electric fleet.
How Much Fuel Did IndyGo Buses Use Last Year?
The fuel-use question is important because it sheds light on how deceptive it was for the pocket guide to tell Indianapolis residents, seemingly about its “fixed line service,” that it “helps lower carbon footprint.” The truth is that without IndyGo the Indianapolis “carbon footprint” would be smaller.
If most of the system averages 3.0 passengers per bus and travels 3.6 miles on a gallon of diesel fuel, then since diesel-fuel combustion emits 22.4 pounds per gallon IndyGo emits 2.1 pounds of carbon dioxide per passenger-mile. To emit more than that while averaging 1.25 passengers a gasoline-powered car would have to get less than 8 mpg—whereas a Prius gets about 50 mpg.
We hasten to add that the 2.1-pounds-per-passenger-mile figure is undoubtedly high; in addition to conventional diesel buses the IndyGo fleet includes non-BRT electric and hybrid buses, which emit less than diesel buses do. Perhaps, moreover, the Red Line’s average electricity consumption is significantly less than the 2.5 kWh/mi we assumed above.
But if IndyGo gave taxpayers the requested fuel-use breakdown they could estimate IndyGo’s “carbon footprint” more accurately.
Why Did IndyGo Buy So Many Red Line Buses?
Its FTA profile said the Red Line project would involve buying thirteen buses. That would have been consistent with the pre-referendum propaganda below.
At the claimed 17 mph a round trip of the 13-mile Red Line route would take (13 miles/traversal × 2 traversals ÷ 17 miles/hour × 60 minutes/mile ≈) 92 minutes. Dividing that round-trip time by the promised ten-minute inter-bus interval tells us that the route would require only ten simultaneously operational buses. Adding three spares would have brought the bus count to the profile’s thirteen.
The presentation that the diagram above came from took place back in July 2016, but IndyGo seems to have persisted in its speed claims at least until the Red Line began operation in September 2019. On May 6, 2019, for example, IndyGo representatives at the College Avenue Library said that the time required to traverse the Red Line’s entire length would be between 37 and 45 minutes. Adding a 15-minute break4 to a round-trip time of (37 + 45 =) 82 minutes brings the total time between round trips to 97 minutes. So thirteen buses would have seemed to be plenty.
But IndyGo has apparently5 bought thirty-one Red Line buses instead. Why would it do that? Well, we saw above that bus rapid transit isn’t as rapid as advertised. However, that can’t explain the whole difference; the longer travel time would raise the number of required operational buses only to thirteen.
One might speculate instead that the real reason for so many buses is that they don’t have the range IndyGo’s Chinese supplier said they would. But we will now see that this can’t be the answer, either, at least if some of what we’ve been told is true.
If one bus each way embarks on a traversal of the 13-mile Red Line route every ten minutes for 19.5 hours out of the Red Line’s nominal 20-hour day, then the Red Line racks up (19.5 hours × 60 minutes/hour ÷ 10 minutes/traversal/direction × 2 directions × 13 miles/traversal =) 3042 bus miles per day. It’s been reported that in sub-zero weather a Red Line bus’s range has been as low as 152 miles. In that case the consumption rate was 3.8 kWh/mi if the bus used up the entire 578 kWh the Chinese say their battery can store. So the Red Line’s 3042 bus miles could translate to as much as (3.8 kWh/mi × 3042 miles ≈) 11.6 MWh of electricity consumption.
If IndyGo uses, say, 14 buses, that means it starts the day with (14 buses × 578 kWh/bus ≈) 8.1 MWh, and charging buses en route at 200 kW for 18 hours out of the 20-hour day adds another 3.6 MWh for a total of 11.7 MWh: enough to run the buses all day, even in sub-zero weather.
Now, that calculation includes only travel on the actual bus route, assumes less charger idle time than is probably realistic, and is based on the assumption that the battery capacity the Chinese claim is all useable energy. But it’s also based on a very high rate of electricity consumption and assumes only one charger: the one at at the north end of the route. Even if IndyGo doesn’t end up putting another charger right on the route, maybe at the Downtown Transit Center, there’s another charger located a ten-minute drive from UIndy at the route’s south end. It’s hard to see why taking advantage of the south-side charger would require more than a single additional bus.
So unless IndyGo is hiding something the Red Line shouldn’t need to have more than fifteen buses available for service even on the coldest day. Yet it seems to have bought about twice that many.
Here’s the situation. IndyGo seems to have put a lot of effort into giving the impression that the Chinese have solved the range problem on their own dime, and IndyGo’s mind-numbing repetition of the phrase good faith in this connection suggests it’s trying to convince itself that it didn’t get hoodwinked:
Over the last two years, BYD has worked in good faith to remedy the mileage range and accommodate the charging needs to reach its contractual obligations for IndyGo’s electric bus fleet. The company paid for the charging plate retrofit for each bus, the establishment of a temporary charging location in late 2019 and three permanent inductive charging stations in 2021 along the Red and Purple lines.
Whatever the Chinese have spent on chargers and retrofitting, however, pales in comparison with what IndyGo paid for at least a dozen buses—at something like $1.3 million apiece—that for all we can tell it doesn’t really need. And what about the cost of the real estate for the three charging stations?
Something’s wrong here. If the Red Line doesn’t require those extra buses, then why has IndyGo squandered taxpayer money to buy them? If it does require them, then why aren’t the Chinese footing the bill? What IndyGo bargained for was enough electric buses to run the Red Line.
True, IndyGo’s failure to put the rapid in bus rapid transit would still have increased the needed bus count. But only by three. For IndyGo to get the benefit of its bargain, the Chinese would have to pay for all the needed buses beyond those three, because their failure to deliver the promised range is what caused IndyGo to need them.
Of course, we’re working with less than complete information, so there could well be a perfectly reasonable explanation. But that’s why we need more transparency and candor from IndyGo.
Conclusion
The Red Line is not as reliable as non-BRT routes are, and it’s barely faster. Its paid ridership has never averaged even half the predicted level. Its articulated buses seem to be particularly prone to collisions, and on College Avenue they won’t stay in their lane. In IndyGo’s implementation, moreover, the BRT approach requires more buses rather than fewer. Very little that IndyGo told referendum voters about BRTs has proven true.
Yet IndyGo is pushing ahead with two more BRT lines. So our next post will present questions about those two lines.
See p. 170 of IndyGo’s January 2023 board report.
See, e.g., p. 101 of IndyGo’s July 2022 board report.
See p. 149 of IndyGo’s January 2023 board report.
Actually, buses don’t need breaks; only drivers do, so switching drivers could theoretically eliminate the need for breaks. But to be conservative we married drivers to buses for this calculation.
See Table XVI of its 2021 finance report.