Indy Ranks Low in Bike Survey (Again)

Gmap bike layer near Butler University

Welcome to bicycling Indy in the post-COVID era. Most of the tens of thousands of bicycles bought by people desperate to get outside during lockdown are collecting dust in garages or buried at the bottom of Craigslist, and local bike lanes and trails are once again quiet except on sunny weekend days. It’s time to see what the good people at People for Bikes think of Indy’s commitment to two-wheel transportation in their 2022 city rankings. 

Summed up in one word? Blechh. Here’s the tale of the tape:

• Overall city rating: 18, 801st of 1236 cities and 129th of 143 large cities. One hundred twenty-ninth!
• Network score of 8/100; well below the average score of 27. The number is meant to be a measure of bike access to services, recreation, retail, and neighborhoods.   
• Community score: 58/100 compared to an average 0f 23. I, for one, question the numbers, such as “how often people ride their bikes” with a 73/100 score of “how safe people feel on bikes” with a score of 48/100. I rather suspect that both numbers are way overstated. 

Perhaps the most misleading number in that People for Bikes score sheet is a score of 49/100 on the topic of “how well the network connects people to places they want to go." Given that the organization’s analysis gave us a score of 8, one of two things has apparently happened. Either the community response (self-selected, FWIW) was heavily influenced by the city’s constant emphasis on the Cultural Trail, or Indy riders don’t want to go anywhere else. After all, the analysis yielded scores of 8 and 9, respectively, for access to retail and access to jobs and schools.

DPW map of Bike lanes

If you were to study the Google Maps bike layer, you might get the impression that there’s great bike infrastructure in at least part of the town. Sadly, however, that map lies. Take, for instance, the image shown above; a screenshot taken today of the bike layer near Butler University. The yellow highlighting marks nonexistent “dedicated lanes.” A similar view from the official bike lanes map from Indy DPW shows that east-west bike lanes are only present east of College Avenue (see image at left). It’s inconceivable that a Division I university in a metropolitan area of more than one million does not have safe bicycle access!

The trails marked on 46th and 52nd are far from the only bogus bike lanes on the maps. Someone at Google thinks that Alabama St. has a bike lane from North to 16th, that Churchman has a dedicated bike lane all the way from Washington to Troy, that a bike lane stretches east along English Avenue from Shortridge to Mithoffer… all of them imaginary. Oh, and don’t try to tell Google that you’ve been on that road – in person – and there’s no bike lane; someone in Mumbai apparently knows better.

All told, Indy’s bike and pedestrian infrastructure is clearly subpar. What’s interesting is that we’ve spent about $30 million to add two miles to the cultural trail and plan to spend another $21 million to extend it another mile across White River. Meanwhile, there is not a single public restroom along the 12-plus miles of the Fall Creek Greenway, only two seasonal restrooms in parks along the Monon, and not one single shelter with a roof where a cyclist or walker can get out of the rain. In contrast there are four public restrooms within the first six miles of the Monon in Hamilton County. Combine that with the execrable pavement, broken glass, and litter strewn in existing bike lanes plus the nonexistent enforcement of parking regulations, and Indy is fully deserving of that 801st-place ranking.

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