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The Keystone Crossover: Can we consider other options on how to get the most out of $6,500,000.00 in public spending? Who comes up with these sad “solutions?” An ugly $6.5mm structure is not the best way to get pedestrians across one solitary street, no matter how busy it is. Please stop letting highway engineers design these crazy concepts before they have sufficiently familiarized themselves with good urban practice as seen around the world. (God, give them a travel budget and some curiousity, please! – or at least google maps?) If pedestrian safety is the issue, try to think about how we can divide $6,500,000.00 by, say 20, and then figure out how to make twenty (20) safe crossings at a cost per copy of a measly $325,000.00. That will do far more for pedestrians without the accompanying ugliness to blight the landscape. What a waste, dagnabit! :/ So sad…Indy. Do better. Expect more. Please!
The only way to get pedestrians safely across Keystone without a bridge would be to narrow it to a single lane in either direction at the crossing with raised crosswalks to force cars to slow down. I agree that we should do this on Keystone and at 20 more of the worst intersections in the city. Ideally, every intersection in the city.
So the city figures out how to get $30 million in federal funding to help supplement projects on their backlog and you’re going to complain about it?
Here’s an idea – maybe tell state legislators to stop hoarding all the funding for INDOT and give more to cities and towns. Then maybe the city of Indianapolis will do projects your way instead of tailoring the projects to what will get matching funds.
The Southside of Indianapolis is torn up because the state decided that what the Southside needed was to expand turn lanes 3-4 feet at the intersections. If they’d actually asked the residents, they’d realized that what was needed was for the actual roads is to be rebuilt. So Meridian Street is one lane in multiple places while the work slowly takes place.
INDOT could use a bit of a funding diet, if you ask me.
That’s a good start for IMPO, but we need the city’s leaders to do more for road safety, on every road, NOW. In 2024 so far, 22 pedestrians and cyclists have been killed – and already 348 incidents (more than 2 a day) in Indianapolis. Drivers have lost their minds out there.
Granted, the image show previously was not correct. Nonetheless, safe pedestrian crossing can be accomodated without a $6.5mm pedestrian bridge over the Keystone. There is already a wide grass strip at the actual location where the trail will cross the Avenue. Without reducing the number of lanes in either direction that grass strip can accommodate a wide pedestrian island as can be found on big busy streets in large cities around the word. Combined with appropriately designed physical barriers and lights, and even some attractive streetscape landscaping, that crossing could be made extraordinarily safe (and attractive) without the extravagant cost and visual blight of an overstreet pedestrian bridge.
Nothing makes a pedestrian feel safer than sitting in the middle of 4 lanes of traffic moving at 50 mph! Seeing the damage to the medians along 38th or the median sculptures that have been destroyed along Emerson is all one needs to understand this is not a good faith suggestion, but just one that would ensure drivers continue to rule the road at everyone else’s expense
DPW deserves a commendation for this. They adjusted their submittals to make sure they were strong, high-performing projects and were rewarded with Federal funds to cover projects that couldn’t be funded locally. Good job!
Great news
Mars Hill and Decatur township are needs sidewalks so people do not have to walk on the highway, railroad tracks, or Mann Road.