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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowNearly one year ago—July 1, 2024—the urban university in downtown Indianapolis known as IUPUI—or Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis—officially split into two separate campuses. This created Indiana University Indianapolis, a standalone campus in the IU system, and Purdue University in Indianapolis, which is considered an extension of Purdue’s main campus in West Lafayette.
IU Indianapolis took the vast majority of the land and buildings considered part of IUPUI. The school is focusing in part on research, commercialization and student opportunity in the life sciences and biotech sectors. With its Lafayette extension, Purdue wants to draw more students interested in engineering and business to the university, including through new degree programs such as motorsports engineering and executive education.
With a relatively modest amount of land set aside for its Indianapolis operations, Purdue needed to figure out how it eventually could have an outsized impact. It recently revealed its long-term plans—16 buildings ranging from five to about 20 stories on just 28 acres of land in the northwest sector of downtown. In this week’s edition of the podcast, IBJ’s Mickey Shuey unpacks Purdue’s high-density strategy to serve 15,000 students per year by 2075.
Mickey also digs deep into perhaps the greatest hindrance to growth in that area—West Street, the wide and heavily trafficked thoroughfare that essentially creates a barrier between the Mile Square and everything to the West. As Mickey reports in the latest issue of IBJ, tearing down that figurative wall is becoming a greater priority for the city of Indianapolis. The Hogsett administration has begun “preliminary discussions” with the neighborhood and universities to develop potential solutions. But any fix likely to come from those talks—whether spanning the roadway with bridges or tunnels, creating a parkway, or adding more crosswalks to slow traffic—will be expensive and likely require consensus from many stakeholders.
Click here to find the IBJ Podcast each Monday. You can also subscribe at iTunes, Tune In, Spotify and any other place you find podcasts.
You can also listen to these recent episodes:
IBJ Podcast: CEO of fast-growing Indy housing developer on urban and suburban markets, being ‘a joiner’
IBJ Podcast: Doug Boles on his ‘physically and emotionally draining’ May in dual role for Speedway, IndyCar
IBJ Podcast: How Irsay’s daughters carved out big roles with Colts and could handle succession
IBJ Podcast: Explaining the Indy 500 tumult, Team Penske scandal and firings, and what’s important
IBJ Podcast: Whatever happened to downtown’s elevated People Mover?
IBJ Podcast: Pete the Planner on student loan collections, recessions, stagflation (and holding our breath)
IBJ Podcast: Inside the Legislature’s wild session on tax breaks, hospitals, IEDC and more
IBJ Podcast: Indiana NIL guru says settlement threatens ‘what we love about college sports’
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West street is more “wide” than “heavily trafficked”. Sure, it gets a lot of cars, but it’s mostly treated as a west-side bypass of downtown, which means it’s basically a less efficient version of the limited access I-65/I-70 corridor that spans the east side. And wasn’t it originally intended to be a separate highway…to “box in” the Mile Square?
Sadly, most of the buildings that front West Street (there aren’t many) aren’t really designed for foot traffic, but that’s kind of understandable given that West Street functions like a high-volume mega road for about 4 hours each day (rush hour morning and evening).
The stretch of West between Indiana and Maryland is by far the most-heavily traveled surface street in downtown. It qualifies as “heavily-trafficked”.
It’s wide and busy because it plays a key role in getting people and emergency vehicles to Riley, Eskenazi, and VA hospitals as well as handling commuting students at IUI and PUI. During major downtown events (Indians baseball, Colts football, conventions, and community events at Military Park, events and concerts at WRSP) it serves lots of visitors using the nearby parking garages.
And most importantly, it’s a major relief valve whenever traffic, accidents, or INDOT cause slowdowns on the interstate loop through downtown, and (as currently with Penn, Illinois, and Capitol) when DPW closes down or severely restricts the major downtown streets for construction of new hotels.
There are high capacity streets and highways that we need as-is in Indianapolis, and West Street is definitely one of them.
Amen Chris!
Purdue should have proposed their own pedestrian bridge over West Street with their long term plan, as they still have time to do so.
IUPUI played with the politics over the years and didn’t make the effort for their pedestrian bridges and tunnels. The Cultural Trail was literally afraid to provide a pedestrian bridge when they had the chance before their contrived routes were established.
The city didn’t have the guts to challenge land owners and stakeholders to provide the further west north-south connectors that would help alleviate the West Street traffic loads.
So here we are today, trying to kick the can again.
West Street is here to stay and is the single most important N/S thoroughfare on the west side of downtown.
Start planning the pedestrian bridges and tunnels now before some other project limits the space and location for such monumental tasks. All still only 5% or less the costs than trying to bury the street.
Further, the only other viable Near West Side through route from 10th south to Washington was White River Parkway West Drive, which got a “road diet” a few years back and can’t handle as much traffic. There is literally no other north-south street more than 2 lanes wide until you get clear out to Holt Road…and it only runs from 10th south to Morris.
Look, I understand the impetus to slow traffic on neighborhood streets. But West hasn’t been a neighborhood street since World War 2. It’s a major thoroughfare and it’s a necessary piece of regional mobility.
Pedestrian bridges are a lazy, ugly solution to a problem that should be solved at street level. London, Paris, and New York have far more traffic than Indianapolis, yet you don’t see pedestrian bridges ruining views and cluttering their streets. Why? Because world-class cities (and decent smaller ones) design for people on the ground. The don’t design in hulking, multimillion-dollar structures for pedestrians to climb above it. They calm traffic, time signals for safe crossings, and raise important crosswalks to sidewalk level to increase visibility, heighten driver awareness, and slow cars where it matters most. Bridges are a backwards solution that inconvenience pedestrians and look bad. Don’t do it here.
Im not certain the majority of people agree with your assesment on the topic….