Carmel to Close Monon 10 Months for Improvements

One of the busiest stretches of multiuse trail anywhere in the Indy Metro area will close for almost a year beginning on January 17, 2022. The Monon rail trail will be blocked off from Monon Green Boulevard (just south of Carter Green, site of Carmel’s Saturday morning farmer’s market and the Christkindlmarkt) to the tunnel that runs beneath City Center Drive. Local authorities say that the project, which will feature improvements including four feet of wider trail (see artist's rendering at right), will close the trail for some ten months.

During the closure, trail users will be provided a detour that will use Carmel Drive, Rangeline Road, and City Center Drive. Although all three are marked as “bicycle-friendly” on local maps and there are bike lanes on sections of Rangeline and City Center; anyone who’s attempted to navigate crossings of the busy roundabout at Rangeline and City Center on two wheels is likely to be already thinking about finding a safer alternative. Such alternatives will depend on whether the trail is blocked at the north or south end of the tunnel under City Center. 

Regardless of how the detour is routed, it’s this writer’s fervent hope that Carmel will do a better job of marking the detour than they did when the tunnel was briefly closed in 2021  for a mural project. For that closure, trail users were detoured west to 3rd Street before returning to the Monon via a driveway and sidewalk combination.

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