Tag «Ballard»

Regional Transit and the Trip Not Taken

Portand MAX Light Rail at the airport (image credit: me)

The past year and some change has been an exciting time for transit in Indianapolis. I feel like we may be moving from the decades of study, study, study to something actually taking place. Proof of that is the current undertaking of the NE Corridor AA/EIS which is also accompanied by a land use study …

Rebuild Indy: What are we rebuilding?

"Repaired" sidewalk along 52nd Street (image credit: me)

In 2010, Mayor Greg Ballard used bonding capacity against equity in our water/sewer utilities as well as future rate increases to fund a program that is called, Rebuild Indy. The first injection of funds came in to the tune of $55 million. It was used to jumpstart the program and largely includes resurfacing streets, repairing some …

Indianapolis’ CSO project

Complete Tunnel System

A little known or seen part of our every day built envrionment will be the focus of one of the city’s largest infrastructure projects ever in coming years. What is commonly called a “CSO” or “Combined Sewer Overflow” is a structure that was implimented in the late 19th and early 20th century. A single system of buried …

Justifying Rail transit for Indy & where it should start

In February of 2010, the city of Indianapolis made an exciting announcement. Mayor Greg Ballard announced that a task force had been formed a year and a half prior to study the long term future of transportation in the Indianapolis area. They coined this marketing blitz, Indyconnect. This wasn’t simply public transportation, this was public …

Where are all those pipes headed?

If you spend any amount of time on the south side of downtown Indianapolis you may have noticed a large scale project going on. It looks to the casual observer like a bunch of pipes that are suppose to be under the ground, that are routed above ground for the most part along city streets …