The story of Franklin Township’s new fee for School Buses has struck such a chord with people that it has now reached NPR. The program hits some familiar themes: Budgets are tight, property taxes are capped, and the district is forced to do more with less. However, being an urban design blog, I wish to …
From time to time I like to troll through the city’s aerial photography records and see how the configuration of our city has changed over time. In particular, it’s fascinating and depressing to see the changes that interstate highway construction brought upon our urban neighborhoods. In some cases, the construction bisected once contiguous neighborhoods; in …
Here’s what I’ve come across in Metropolitan Development Commission (MDC) and Indianapolis Historic Preservation Commission (IHPC) filings as of 11/8/11 (click links to read staff reports on these cases): 1. MDC Hearing Examiner 11/10/11 – The previously reported plan to put a gas station at 324 W Morris (SE of the I-70 West/Missouri exit downtown) …
If you go to the polls tomorrow, please remember what our task is as a community. If I can stress only one point, it is that voting simply by bracketed letter, “(R) or (D)” for example, or voting based on party color can have extremely negative impacts. I have long said that local elections can mean …
Sorry for the lack of wallpapers the past couple months. Something about a family, full time job, 19 month old, Calculus, Statistics and travelling to DC got me down…. anyway, I tried something totally different this time around. I took the original from Georgia Street looking north on an alleyway between Pennsylvania and Meridian. Hope …
Joe is a graduate of the Urban Planning program at Ball State university and a frequent commenter at Urban Indy. He commutes by bicycle daily from Fall Creek Place to work in Avon.  We look forward to adding another voice to our community. Welcome aboard, Joe!
I have the privilege of showing some photographs at the Mass Ave Wine Shoppe for the month of November. I have assembled a small set of photos from the last year worth of travelling around the country. My aim is to help expose people to the superior transit systems that appear around the country. Even in …
I reported a couple of weeks ago that Indianapolis had received a grant from the FTA to study “bus rapid transit” on the central corridors comprised of Washington Street east/west and some combination of streets north/south from Carmel, through downtown to the University of Indianapolis on the south side. This post attempts to explore the possible …
Here’s what I’ve come across in Metropolitan Development Commission (MDC) and Indianapolis Historic Preservation Commission (IHPC) filings as of 11/1/11 (click links to read staff reports on these cases): 1. MDC 11/2/11: A plan by Milhaus Development for apartments on the west side of the Monon Trail between 20th and 21st is being continued all …
The Indianapolis DPW contracted this job out during 2011. I am not 100% sure of the overall scope involved since I have seen reconstruction of 46th from College Ave all the way to Emerson and even beyond that. For the purposes of this post, I am going to focus on the section that is bounded …