INDIANAPOLIS — A bill that could put the future of IndyGo’s Blue Line in question was heard by Indiana’s Senate Thursday.
Senate Bill 52 would ban traffic lanes from being used, in the future, only for buses.
The bill’s author, Sen. Aaron Freeman, R-District 32, made a change to SB 52 that had nothing to do with bus lanes.
Instead, it had to do with “No Turn on Red” signs that the city of Indianapolis put up last summer — signs that another bill written by Freeman, Senate Bill 108, would force Indianapolis to take down.
Last session, the legislature passed a law prohibiting Indianapolis from passing an ordinance that would allow for more “No Turn on Red” signs to go up. A month before that law went into effect, though, Indianapolis passed an ordinance that led to dozens of new “No Turn on Red” signs going up across the city last August.
Thursday afternoon, Freeman offered a change to his bus lane bill that would allow Indy’s new “No Turn on Red” signs to stay up, along with any other “No Turn on Red” signs installed before March 31 of this year.
After that, Freeman is calling for no new “No Turn on Red” signs in Indianapolis until July 2025, giving a task force time to study the issue.
“That is a compromise between me and the city of Indianapolis,” Freeman told the Senate.
So what about the part of SB 52 that bans future dedicated lanes for buses, like the ones that are part of the proposed Blue Line?
That part of the bill is staying put.
“We should not do dedicated lanes. We should only do shared lanes,” Freeman said.
IndyGo has said to change the Blue Line project now from dedicated lanes to shared lanes would put hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding for the project at risk.
"When it comes to a one-year delay of the Blue Line as outlined in the latest version of Senate Bill 52, costs are only going to increase and the existing infrastructure is only going to further deteriorate, which means more costly repairs," IndyGo said in a response to the Senate discussion Thursday. "We are very close to the maximum amount for a project to qualify for the FTA’s Small Starts program. If the project costs exceed the $400 million limit, we’ll need to apply under the New Starts program, and that criteria will be much more difficult to meet."
IndyGo said the current cost of the project is between $370 million and $390 million.
State Sen. Fady Qaddoura, D-District 30, called a ban on dedicated lanes that could impact the Blue Line’s future and federal funding for it “bad public policy.”
“It interferes with local government, and that shouldn’t be our job to micromanage shared lanes versus dedicated lanes in our local communities,” Qaddoura said.
Freeman believes dedicated lanes would slow down the traffic flow along Washington Street, where the Blue Line would be built spanning from Hancock County to Hendricks County, all the way to Indianapolis International Airport.
“I think it’s ironic that we have somebody actually trying to control this project and it doesn’t even affect his district,” said Senate Minority Leader Greg Taylor, D-District 33.
Opponents of Freeman’s bill, like Taylor and some who live along Washington Street, say traffic needs to slow down to make pedestrians in the area safer.
Several business owners along Washington Street where the proposed Blue Line would be built testified last week about their concerns over how it could impact their businesses.
Some, though, withdrew their support for SB 52 this week.
The Senate still has to vote on whether to send the bill to the House. Thursday, House Speaker Todd Huston, R-District 37, said if the bill makes it over there, they’d certainly discuss it, saying the bill was not dead.
“I don’t want to stop the dedicated lanes discussion in perpetuity,” said Huston, who reiterated that he'd like to see the dedicated lanes issue be part of a larger discussion on road funding in the 2025 budget session. “I believe we need a comprehensive road funding discussion in the 2025 legislature as part of the budget."
Huston said he had not talked with Freeman about the “No Turn on Red” signs amendment he added Thursday to the bill.