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The rapid-transit bus line connecting downtown Indianapolis to Lawrence and areas of the far-east side will take off from the Julia M. Carson Transit Center and run on freshly-painted lanes and new stations on Sunday, Oct. 13.
The $188 million Purple Line project broke ground in February 2022 with the goal of providing some of the city’s most distressed neighborhoods along the East 38th Street corridor and northward with better access to jobs, groceries and safe travel.
IndyGo says the new line will put 134,603 jobs and 58,470 people within walking distance of a bus station, along with serving a 61.6% minority population a 30.3% low-income population.
More than half of the budget for the Purple Line went toward infrastructure improvements, including the addition of sidewalks, multi-use paths, curb ramps, new traffic signals and stormwater systems.
IndyGo communications specialist Ashlynn Neumeyer said the line is bringing benefits to a historically underserved area.
“Without this project, who knows how long this community would have gone without improvements such as these,” Neumeyer said.
The Purple Line will replace most of Route 39, IndyGo’s most popular route aside from the Red Line. The route had a ridership of 58,046 in August, according to a September board report.
Ridership is occasionally a weak spot for IndyGo, which hit a low of 281,060 monthly riders in April 2020 and has yet to rebound fully to pre-pandemic levels. In August, total ridership reached 642,000, according to SAVI, compared with a 2018 average of 735,000 monthly riders.
IndyGo Chief Public Affairs Officer Carrie Black said there is no set goal for Purple Line ridership, but the agency would like to see growth above the Route 39 riders who will likely make the switch.
Riders will see some changes in the route in terms of frequency and means of payment, Black said. While IndyGo’s normal fixed routes have fare boxes aboard buses, riders pay for rapid-transit line rides prior to boarding at ticket vending machines on the platform or by using IndyGo’s MyKey app. After receiving a ticket, riders must validate their ticket at the validator.
“We strongly encourage that they switch over to MyKey,” Black said.
Instead of fixed schedules, rapid-transit lines have buses arriving at regular intervals. From downtown to the 38th and Park Avenue Station—where the Purple Line shares stations and lanes with the Red Line—buses will arrive roughly every five to 10 minutes. Further east along the route, buses will arrive roughly every 15 to 20 minutes.
Those riders will also notice improved platforms with covered seating and screens that show real-time updates on bus arrival.
The Purple Line is the second of IndyGo’s three planned rapid-transit lines. The first, the Red Line, launched in 2019. That launch had several hiccups that stemmed from implementing several new technologies at once, Black said, providing IndyGo with a learning opportunity.
Additionally, the agency saw increased wear-and-tear at the station from the heavier weight of the electric buses at stations, which meant concrete pads along the Red Line route needed to be rebuilt ahead of schedule.
“That was a very evident, very public lesson learned with our Red Line enhancements, we realized that we didn’t go deep enough when pouring the concrete slabs at each of the the stations,” Black said. Because of that, the concrete pads at the Purple Line are poured deeper.
The project was funded mostly out of federal coffers. The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Transit Administration Small Starts Capital Investment Grant gave nearly $81 million to IndyGo for the project, while the FTA’s Capital Investment Grant contributed 50% of the $188 million total cost. The remaining costs were paid by local funding from the transit income tax, Indianapolis Department of Public Works and the Federal Highway Administration.
IndyGo will hold a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new line on Friday, Oct. 18.
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As somebody who reads through IndyGo’s monthly board reports, they have been slowly but surely fixing Red Line problems and they’ve definitely been applying the lessons learned to the Purple Line. Leadership from 2020 & on has been good.