Back in 2012, Curt Ailes posted an article containing a few maps of the surface parking lots downtown. After these maps came up on twitter, I figured that now would be a good time to compare the lots to what currently exists.
First , I took the old lots and contrasted them with the new ones. The new configurations are shown in red below, whereas the 2011 parking lots are shown in blue:
Next, the more interesting map for our purposes. The parking lots shown in red are the ones from 2011 , while the blue ones are the existing lots:
There are fewer large blocks of parking lots downtown. With the notable exception of Eskanzi Hospital, many of the newer lines are things such as parking islands for code compliance and such. Something else to note is that this is just surface parking. It’s vary rare for a new project to not include an interior garage. It’s still a car city, after all. Hopefully, that can begin to change once the Red Line is up and running later this year.
Interesting comparison. Hopefully the Red Line gets off to a good start. I’m hoping we get rid of some of our larger surface lots over here in Dayton in the coming years
The introduction of bus rapid transit in Indianapolis will likely have little impact on reducing downtown’s car-centric traffic under the current plan. There will only be three BRT lines, feeding into downtown from just five outer origination points: north (at Broad Ripple), northeast (at Lawrence), east (at Cumberland), south (at U of Indy), and west (at KIND). At or near most of these locations, there will be little if any commuter parking available to allow suburban workers the ability to leave their cars and get to downtown on the BRT. There is no plan to have a line from the northwest part of the city, and it may be years before the suburbs beyond Marion County become a part of the BRT. As a first phase, what is planned can only be considered a baby step. To be fully useful, much more needs to be done.
Exactly so. The lack of park and ride options is really shortsighted.
there should be literally no lots downtown, drives me crazy, like the one next to IBJ or the one america lots.