With Blue Line plans scaled back, city embarks on its own infrastructure project

With IndyGo's Blue Line bus rapid transit project out of the picture for a portion of West Washington Street, the city's Department of Public Works is stepping in with infrastructure improvements to part of that roadway.

The work on West Washington Street between Holt Road and Lynhurst Drive extends an already-planned project to address long-time flooding issues in the adjacent Fleming Garden neighborhood.

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City officials had been looking toward the Blue Line bus rapid transit project to fix long-needed drainage issues on Washington Street, the city's main east-west thoroughfare. But in October, IndyGo's board of directors voted to exclude the 11-mile segment between Holt Road and the Indianapolis International Airport from the future Blue Line project in light of consistent pressure from state lawmakers to change the bus lane configuration through that area to maintain traffic lanes. The Blue Line will instead divert onto I-70 for that portion, a stretch of about 9 miles.

In addition to providing dedicated bus lanes for frequent electric buses, the Blue Line project also includes improvements to drainage, sidewalks, roads and traffic signals. But now these kinds of improvements to West Washington Street, west of Holt Road, are up to the city alone.

The portion the city has now pledged dollars toward, a 1.5-mile stretch from Holt to Lynhurst, represents a sizeable chunk of the dropped Blue Line area on Washington Street. The Blue Line would have continued west for another mile until High School Road, then south to the airport.

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Totaling an estimated $20 million, the work will include addressing drainage issues on the neighborhood streets, and on Washington specifically, fixing stormwater drainage problems, giving the road new asphalt, building new sidewalks and potentially, a multi-use path.

More than half the project cost, $12.5 million, will come from the airport's tax increment financing district. These dollars were pledged to the Blue Line, but are now freed up for the city's use, public works spokesperson Ben Easley said.

What exact improvements are needed to address flooding in the area will come out through the design process. For now, the city has directed designers to try to include a new sidewalk on one side of West Washington Street and multi-use path on the other, believing there is enough right-of-way land for that, Easley said. Currently on that stretch, there are almost no sidewalks.

The city has had the Fleming Garden neighborhood on its priority list for addressing flooding problems since 2017, Easley said.

The scope of that project would have just included drainage work on some neighborhood streets from approximately Holt Road to Auburn Street, bordered to the north and south by railroad tracks. City officials were getting ready to move forward with design when the Blue Line change came through. Then they decided to extend the project to include that portion of West Washington Street.

"This is more than an infrastructure project, it is a quality of life project for the Fleming Garden Community," city-county councilor Jared Evans, whose district this impacts, said in a news release. "This project will give people safe access to transit, food, local businesses, and much more.”

Design will now begin in 2023, and construction potentially in 2025.

Contact IndyStar transportation reporter Kayla Dwyer at kdwyer@indystar.com or follow her on Twitter @kayla_dwyer17.