Is Indy a Bike-Friendly City?

Indianapolis Bike Infrastructure

In a word, no. Don’t just take my word for it, though, ask some of the national biking organizations what they think of the Circle City and you’ll find them frequently disappointed. The League of American Bicyclists says that Indy deserves a “bronze” award, which – if you ask me – is basically a participation trophy. By comparison, South Bend is a silver and Bloomington brought home a gold. What peeves this road cyclist is that Indy’s proudest accomplishments of the 21st century, according to the town's LAB report card, are the cultural trail and the bikeshare program. Big whoop. The town has a whole two staffers dedicated to bike programs; compared to Carmel, which has six for a population 1/10th that of Marion County.

We know why, of course: it costs money to create bike-friendly infrastructure and it peeves drivers when part of “their” street is taken away for a bike lane. Still, you’d think they would work a little harder at it.

Which brings me to the latest ranking scheme to cross my email, city-by-city rankings for some 500 US cities published by People for Bikes. The usual suspects land at the top of the rankings, of course: Portland, Ore., Tucson, Ariz., Boulder, Colo… At the opposite end of the spectrum are places like Foxborough, Mass. (guess Tom Brady doesn’t ride a bike) and San Bernardino, Cal.. But where does Indy land? Believe it or not, just outside the top 50… JUST outside, at 51. What makes People for Bikes think Indy deserves this ranking?

Well, first, being number 51 is no great shakes: the cities are rated on a 5-point scale; so presumably the best you can get is a 5.0 rating. If that’s the case, our 2.3 is around a C-minus or a D-plus. Oddly enough, the highest rating of any city is a whopping 3.5; only Fort Collins, Colo., and Wausau, Wis., reached that lofty plateau. But let’s look at how Indy fared:

• Ridership (an estimate of how many people ride how often); a 2.0 score puts us in 54th place
• Safety (pedestrian and cycling combined): a score of 1.5 drops us to around 300th
• Network (a measure of network quality): our score of 1.4, while not unexpected, places Indy in the bottom third at something like 370th
• Reach (how well the network serves the entire community): a score of 1.6 is slightly better, but still around 350th.
• Acceleration (how quickly the community is expanding its network and outreach): a score of 2.4 puts Indy 40th. Sounds great…

A glance at a city map makes it pretty obvious where Indianapolis fails its cycling community. The biggest problems are all, at least in my opinion, caused by poor connectivity, especially outside the city's core. Because of a lack of bike lanes and bike paths, cyclists are forced to ride on busy, narrow streets with poorly-maintained pavement.

Huge sections of the Circle City lack any infrastructure at all: look at a map of Indy's bike lanes and you'll notice that there is not a single east-west bike lane south of Raymond, and only one – Shelby – that runs north-south! Try getting from east to west across the north side: who in his right mind believes that 86th/82nd is "bike-friendly”? Or believes that you can get from the Canal trail to the Newfields entrance on 38th Street without taking your life in your hands? In reality, Network, Reach, and Safety are of a piece; and if the city doesn’t put more “acceleration” into connecting what safe routes there are now, safety is not going to improve – and neither is ridership.

How about Indy spends less time patting itself on the back for the Monon and the Cultural Trail and spends more time getting cyclists across town safely? That – not more bike-rental stations on the Cultural Trail – is what’s going to raise the city’s bike-friendliness rating. Well, that, and running a street sweeper down the bike paths and bike-friendly streets: not everyone rides a beach cruiser…

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