Pete Buttigieg visits Indy to tout street-conversions grant

U.S. Transportation Sec. Pete Buttigieg spoke Thursday afternoon at Cummins Plaza in downtown Indianapolis, flanked by one-way streets that will be converted to two-ways under a recently announced $25 million federal grant.

Buttigieg, the former Democratic mayor of South Bend, touted spending from the U.S. Department of Transportation into his home state due to the $550 billion federal Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and gave kudos to fellow Democratic officials for helping secure the funding.

The main reason for Buttigieg’s visit was to discuss the Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity, or RAISE grant, which will be matched with just more than $20 million in city funds. A total of $46.5 million will be used to convert segments of eight one-way streets into two-way streets.

Buttigieg said the support of U.S. Rep. Andre Carson (who hosted Buttigieg on Thursday) and his colleagues—and some support from the other side of the aisle—helped pass the $2 billion grant program even after “the political obituary” had been written several times.

The Department of Transportation received about $15 billion in requests for about $2 billion in funding. Indianapolis being chosen “speaks to the quality of this project and the vision of this community,” Buttigieg said.

“This city has so much to be proud of under Mayor Hogsett’s leadership,” Buttigieg said of the Democratic mayor who faces a Republican challenger in his bid for a third term.

Buttigieg told IBJ that seeing “the continued growth and trajectory” of Indianapolis is rewarding, especially knowing that the Department of Transportation has contributed to it.

RAISE grant, pedestrian safety

In the 1960s, conversion of Indianapolis streets from two-way to one-way helped facilitate white flight from the urban core and into the suburbs, Indianapolis City-County Council Vop Osili said in written remarks. The one-way streets continue to serve “the needs of people who don’t live in neighborhoods that those streets traverse,” he added.

Osili said the grant will “allow us to revive neighborhoods along high-speed, high-traffic one-way streets.”

Studies say two-way streets tend to slow traffic while creating more direct routes, visibility and the opportunity for more commerce. In Louisville, one study reported a 60% decrease in collisions while another reported a 32% decrease in crime on the shifted streets.

In South Bend, the conversion of a pair of one-way streets to two-way streets spurred $90 million in new investment, Buttigieg said.

The eight one-way streets that will be converted in Indianapolis, he said, have seen more than 1,400 crashes in about three years. Those streets will be “modernized” to include bike lanes and sidewalk improvements as well as being converted.

The project is expected to go out to bid in 2026 and be completed in 2027.

Street design is part of what contributes to pedestrian and cyclist deaths, Buttigieg told IBJ. Indianapolis saw a record of 40 pedestrian deaths last year.

This is part of a “national crisis, a dramatic increase in roadway deaths,” he said. Roadway design changes, like the RAISE grant will fund, are part of the solution, but not the complete solution, he added.

“We need to have safer roads, safer speeds, safer drivers, safer vehicles and a higher standard of post-crash care,” Buttigieg said. “Those are the pillars of our national roadway safety strategy.”

There are sizable communities that have seen a year go by with zero roadway deaths, he added. “We want to add to the roster of communities that realized Vision Zero, and I know there’s a strong sentiment here to safety that we want to support.”

Mass transit investments

The U.S. Department of Transporation has recently given IndyGo, Indianapolis’ transit agency, $19 million to purchase diesel-electric hybrid buses and $33 million to fund a garage at the agency’s new East Campus headquarters.

IndyGo’s bus-rapid-transit lines have relied heavily on federal funding, with those funds making up half of the $370 million IndyGo predicts will be needed to build out the planned the Blue Line. Those investments are necessary to give workers and students mobility, Buttigieg said, and generally have a very good return.

“Now you still have to do it the right way and it, you know, requires a lot of careful work to maximize potential, but I see a lot of potential and what is happening here with the bus-rapid-transit effort,” he said. Buttigieg met earlier in the day with IndyGo CEO Inez Evans, IndyGo shared on social media.

He noted that bus rapid transit is dramatically cheaper than alternatives such as light rail or a subway system, and said cars are often out of reach or not available.

“We have lived too long with people having very few options,” he told IBJ.

Key Indiana Bipartisan Infrastructure Law investments

Earlier in the day, Buttigieg visited The Idle, a pocket park overlooking Interstate 65 and Interstate 70 near Fletcher Place and Fountain Square. Construction of the inner loop in the 1970s displaced 17,000 people.

“Standing in that remarkably creative Idle Park gave me a sense of how that affected the neighborhood and made me even more pleased that we are now partnering with community members here to do planning work to envision a different, better future through our Reconnecting Communities Program,” Buttigieg told attendees.

A $2 million grant announced in February will fund a study on the possibility of capping the recessed segments of Interstates 65 and 70 in the inner loop, near the Fletcher Place and Fountain Square neighborhoods. Capping refers to building a type of deck bridge on top of a roadway to create new surface area for development.

Even though the federal Reconnecting Communities grant is just a planning grant, Buttigieg said, it’ll support community work to find a shared vision for a possible future project. In 2021, Rethink Coalition and the Indy Chamber put together a $2.8 billion proposal to rebuild the highways partially underground.

Outside of Indianapolis, he pointed to a $1.6 million grant for Tell City that will allow the city to stabilize a crane at an Ohio River port and a $7 million grant to create an railroad overpass in Hammond, where images of children squeezing through dangerous blocked railroad crossings received national attention.