Two Minutes Becomes Fifty-Six
A Reflection on Press Misinformation, Home Rule, and Edmund Burke
A recent misleading Indianapolis Star article about the Indiana General Assembly’s Senate Bill 52 underscores the importance of Edmund Burke’s famous observation:
Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.
The bill in question would temporarily prevent the Indianapolis Public Transportation Corporation (“IndyGo”) from dedicating Washington Street lanes exclusively to the buses of IndyGo’s planned Blue Line. The article omitted an important fact when it quoted a claim from a letter to the editor that a bus trip downtown from the airport would be nearly an hour shorter on the Blue Line than on current Route 8, which the Blue Line will replace:
With dedicated lanes that avoid traffic jams, stoplight control that guarantees a green light throughout the route, level boarding, and a properly located station at the airport, that trip that currently takes 1 hour and 21 minutes might end up taking only 25 minutes.
The fact the Star omitted was that almost none of the claimed fifty-six-minute difference would require dedicating lanes to bus travel.
Note in this connection that only a single mile of the proposed 13.6-mile Blue Line route from the airport to the downtown transit center will be dedicated exclusively to buses, although lane sharing on another 2.8 miles will be restricted to turning vehicles only. Those restrictions are all to be imposed within the 4.1-mile stretch of Washington Street between Holt Road and the Transit Center, so that’s the only stretch on which dedicated lanes can possibly reduce travel time.
And even without dedicated lanes this stretch can currently take as little as seventeen minutes, whereas a similar-length Red Line stretch that provides 3.6 miles of lanes dedicated exclusively to buses takes fifteen minutes, i.e., as little as two minutes less. (The exact times vary with the time of the day and the day of the week, so the reader may want to follow the links to obtain some sense of the variation.) Since the Blue Line will have only nine stops on that Washington Street stretch instead of the current Route 8’s seventeen, moreover, the two minutes’ savings in riding time on that stretch would probably come at the cost of a similar amount of added walking time for people who board at intermediate stops.
The truth of the matter is that unless riders are currently doing something stupid it would be impossible to knock fifty-six minutes off the trip from the airport; the entire trip currently takes only something like thirty-seven minutes. The quoted trip length of an hour and twenty-one minutes resulted from having the rider walk for forty-one minutes, to the west end of the parking lot, instead of catching the bus at the parking garage.
Moreover, the Blue Line won’t provide the service that Route 8 currently does along the 5.3-mile section of Washington Street between Bridgeport Road and Holt Road. Instead, it will use I‑70 to bypass that stretch and thereby take as little as twelve minutes to reach Holt Road instead of the twenty minutes Route 8 currently takes to reach it by way of Washington Street. So by using that same expedient IndyGo could make the airport-to-downtown trip without dedicated lanes in something like twenty-nine minutes if it chose to.
Yet the Star’s readers are left with the impression that dedicated lanes will save riders nearly an hour.
This brings us back to the Edmund Burke observation quoted above. Current circumstances provide reasons, beyond the legislature’s deliberative and non-parochial purpose on which Burke primarily relied, for legislators not to follow public opinion slavishly. Yes, the legislator should give due consideration to his constituents’ opinions—or, rather, to what their opinions would be if they had the facts. But the current climate particularly impedes knowing what those opinions would be. As the Star’s article illustrates, for example, the press works mightily to prevent the public from getting all the facts. And in this case when certain citizens provided facts a City-County Councilor found uncongenial he stirred up threats to their livelihoods.
Even when the facts are available to the public, moreover, the legislator’s job is to give those facts more attention than the average citizen can usually take time for. Consider dedicated-lanes proponents’ safety argument, for example. As our previous post demonstrated, the Blue Line provides little if any transportation improvement over Route 8, so its supporters have resorted to arguing that dedicating lanes to buses will reduce vehicle speed and thus traffic fatalities. The problem with this argument is that all of us accept some level of driving risk in order to save time. So the legislator needs to consider critically whether dedicated lanes will reduce the risk enough to justify the time cost.
And on this point Blue Line proponents have made a poor case. To get dedicated lanes they’ve chosen to exploit the tragic death of a seven-year-old girl who was killed when a car running a red light pushed another car into running over her. The car that ran the red light was driven by an intoxicated teen-ager fleeing from someone she’d cut off in traffic. The thoughtful legislator needs to ask himself whether dedicated lanes are really the most cost-effective way of preventing drunk teenagers from running red lights. Coverage such as the Star’s and intemperate remarks from Council members don’t encourage the public to consider such issues.
Incidentally, the Blue Line debate also illustrates a virtue of limiting government. Unlimited democracy is often likened to two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. It’s important to limit what the majority can force the minority to do because, however often we vote with the wolves, most of us find ourselves in the position of the lamb at some time or other. As the Founding Fathers recognized, failing to impose such limits is therefore a recipe for tyranny.
But another reason for limiting government is that in most cases we dedicate vastly more thought to decisions about things like individual spending than we do to what we’re voting on. We’re therefore likely to allocate our scarce resources much more effectively by individual-expenditure decisions than by collective action at the ballot box.
In this case the General Assembly had imprudently expanded the ambit of government action back in 2014 by conferring upon the Indianapolis City-County Council the power to impose an income tax for IndyGo’s benefit. Duped by a massive propaganda campaign significantly supported by their own tax dollars, residents approved the tax in a referendum and thereby unwittingly ended up paying more in subsidies for IndyGo rides than taking cabs would have cost.
More to the point here, that vote ended up conferring on the Council and IndyGo the power to cost the vast majority of residents far more time as motorists than a handful of them save as bus riders. It’s hardly clear that residents would have voted the way they did if they’d known all this beforehand and been given the time to reflect upon it. Senate Bill 52’s opponents criticize it as an attack on home rule, but another way to look at it is clawing back to individuals a tiny bit of the freedom they’d lost to the transit-tax statute—and that the statute’s repeal would restore to them.
The Star led residents to believe that the Blue Line will cut nearly an hour off the bus trip from the airport even though that trip can actually take as little as thirty-seven minutes and would take something like eight minutes less than that if Route 8 provided as little service as the Blue Line will. If democracy dies in darkness, news media like the Star may prove to be its executioner.
Part of the problem is IndyGo's computer system. Both their website (https://www.indygo.net/plan-your-trip/) and IndyGo's myStop app (promoted at https://www.indygo.net/plan-your-trip/track-my-bus/) don't always suggest the best stops. For example, if I ask to take the bus from "Indianapolis International Airport" to where I live, it suggests I get on the bus at that far off bus stop at "W. Perimeter Rd. & North Service Rd" instead of the one closest to the terminal. It also suggests I get off at a bus stop that is a block away from the closest bus stop to my address. (It suggests walking by the nearest bus stop on my way home!)
Adding to IndyGo's financial woes (if only a little bit), I can get free rides on the bus. How? There's been something wrong with their mykey app. If I select "Ride Now", it shows a QR code that is to be scanned on the bus. I did two roundtrip bus rides separated by about six months last year. It never scanned properly for me. However, they let me ride anyway because my phone's screen accurately shows a balance of $5. Who knows how many other people are affected by this, but it could be a large number as I think I saw it happen to another rider.