By Eric Jaffe
CityLab
Indianapolis is about as car-reliant as it gets for a big American city. Census data from 2013 puts the share of city commuters who drive to work alone at 82 percent. Another 10 percent do carpool, though predominantly with just two people total in the vehicle, while only 2 percent take public transportation and another 2 percent walk. If you squint you can see the bicycle commute share: roughly half a percent.
Local planners do seem to recognize the problem, and they have some ideas in the works to change it. The city has drafted a major new zoning plan called Indy Rezone, the first such update in decades, which takes some meaningful if modest steps toward encouraging alternative transportation modes. Here’s one planner speaking about the Rezone vision to the Indianapolis Star:
“Drive, drive, drive has been the Central Indiana paradigm for years and many developers still have that mentality,” said Tammara Tracy, principal city planner. “We are trying to ease them into the new urban model with carrots.”
These carrots will take the form of relaxed parking requirements. In Indy, as in many U.S. cities, residential and commercial building developers have parking minimums, meaning they’re required to construct a certain number of parking spaces. The negative results of these minimums can include way more parking than the market would demand, higher rents to cover the (very high) cost of making the spaces, and of course more traffic.
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