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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowIndianapolis has been awarded a $19.9 million grant from the federal Department of Transportation, the city announced Monday. Beginning next year, the funds will be used to study and redesign six road segments.
Indianapolis’ grant is a portion of the $1 billion in grant money from that is being awarded under the federal Safe Streets and Roads for All program. The city was one of 354 communities selected for funding in the latest round of grants.
Since 2022, more than 1,400 communities have been awarded under the program. The city, along with IndyGo, applied for the grant earlier this year.
Many of the local street segments slated for reconstruction are in underserved areas lacking infrastructure for pedestrians, transit users and bicyclists, according to the city.
The grant money will fund design, engineering, and construction in the following areas:
- Post Road between Washington Street and 38th Street
- East 30th Street between Rural Street and Franklin Road
- Lynhurst Drive between Morris Street and West 22nd Street
- East 42nd Street between Franklin Road & Mitthoefer Road
- Franklin Road between 30th Street 42nd Street
- Thompson Road between East Street and Madison Avenue
The Indianapolis Metropolitan Planning Organization also announced Monday that it received $480,000 from the federal program. The IMPO is the federally-designated organization responsible for transportation planning for central Indiana. The funds will be used to update the region’s safety action plan, according to a release from the agency.
The update will include the safety analysis and identification of areas with high road injuries, the purchase and analysis of data related to vulnerable road users and a road safety audit of 20 locations. Additionally, the IMPO plans to host a Safety Summit to provide educational opportunities to improve traffic safety.
Road safety advocates in Indianapolis are raising the alarm that August saw an unprecedented rise in instances where drivers struck pedestrians and cyclists. According to Indy Pedestrian Safety Crisis, an advocate-run dashboard that collects data on incidents based on 911 calls, 103 people were struck on city roads last month. That’s a nearly 59% increase over 2023, when Indy Pedestrian Safety Crisis found that drivers struck 65 individuals in August.
The Indianapolis City-County Council voted last month to create a task force that would work toward a goal of zero road deaths by 2035.
At the same time, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released an early estimate last week that road deaths have declined nationally. An estimated 18,720 people died in motor vehicle traffic crashes, a decrease of about 3.2 percent compared with 19,330 fatalities in the first half of 2023. Fatalities declined in both the first and second quarters of 2024.
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Recommendation No. 1: Stripe all crosswalks in Indianapolis with standard white rectangles, which indicate, the world over: “Crosswalk here.”
End the practice, epitomized by the Cultural Trail, of replacing standard crosswalk markings with curlicue designs + marketing messages.
Recommendation 2: Turn those newly striped crosswalks into speed tables.
We aren’t going to paint our way out of this crisis.
Reduce the roads to one lane each direction, put bike paths in and make the city more undrivable like they have done in the rest of the city!
Well said, Steve R. Don’t forget cutting off a main North/South artery, but dropping an astroturf park in a quarter of Monument Circle….
That sounds great let’s do it immediately.
Apparently the city is not serious about increased road funding from the state formula since the local priority is new wave road design.
Post Road was just totally reconstructed over the last two years, which was the second time it was rebuilt in the last 25 years. How about we fix and upgrade the existing bad pavements before we keep trying to make national lists of cool street design.
I don’t think you understand how things work. Federal government offered free design money. We took it. We can’t just take the money and use it for whatever we want.
The feds offer free building money if we use it as part of implementing dedicated bus lanes. Our legislators have made it quite clear they don’t want to see any more of that.
The issue is the Marion County Republican legislators who fail us at the Statehouse. They let the rest of the state take our road funding so the folks who live in the parts of Indiana where the population is diminishing can have nice, sparely travelled state highways and INDOT can lose their minds implementing things that traffic engineers might love but citizens don’t care about.
We need both more road funding as a state and the percentage that goes to cities and towns needs to increase.
Yeah and the Post road reconstruction was just a re-do of exactly what was there because any redesign was going to be more expensive. When the city is starving for road dollars, you have to go with what is cheapest.
I see we are still not going to get sidewalks in Decatur Township or any safe places for people to walk along Kentucky Avenue, Lynhurst, High School Road, and Mann Road.
You need to be in the middle of a heavily democrat district to get your share Richard.
Making one way roads into “neighborhood friendly” streets was/is bad idea, they are more dangerous now escpecially to cyclist.
From a cyclist who lives along one of these streets, no they don’t.
I was in NYC a few weeks ago for the first time in several years. The changes were amazing. A lot of east west streets had gone from two lanes to one lane with a bicycle lane and in a lot of cases, space for outdoor dining. Broadway was closed to cars and trucks and there was only bike lanes. Guess what?!? The city was still just as bustling as ever. The changes seemed to be great. Taxi drivers I talked to, didn’t think it made that much difference and in one case mentioned that the new extra “outdoor dining lane” gave delivery vehicles designated spots to pull into to.
We don’t really how good we had it when Mass Ave was closed to traffic. Sigh
Sweden is home to the vision zero idea. It is where it has had the most success. When I was driving in Sweden maybe a dozen years ago, the thing that I had the hardest time getting used to was that at signaled intersections, there was NO SIGNAL ON THE FAR SIDE OF THE INTERSECTION. That meant that you had to stop well back from the intersection to even see your own traffic signal, like 15 or 20 feet farther back than I am used to in the US. I suspect (but never found out) that pulling up to the corner, where you could no longer see the signal was considered running the light and might have resulted in a ticket.