Bloomington Transit outlines three options for route changes at public meeting

Good-natured debate filled a room in the Monroe County Public Library Thursday night as Bloomington residents and a few IU students pored over potential changes for Bloomington Transit routes.

For the first part of the meeting, consulting representative Dennis Fletcher gave the results of a survey conducted after a similar meeting in April. Fletcher then presented three options for changes to routes and let everyone split into groups to discuss the options and write down suggestions. At the end of the meeting, members of each group presented their opinions to the room, which will be used to formulate a “preferred service action” to be approved and started within five years.

About 30 people attended the first meeting in April, said Bloomington Transit General Manager Lewis May. The meeting provided the basis for which Fletcher’s firm created three options for changes to Bloomington Transit: a radial, grid-like or corridor system. Fletcher joked that the systems were fairly similar.

“The differences between these are pretty subtle,” he said.

All options would increase services on weekends, make routes more direct and mostly increase the frequency of buses, Fletcher said. The radial and grid-like systems would involve 27 buses – about the number of buses Bloomington Transit already has on routes – with an increase in service hours. The corridor-based system would be the cheapest, Fletcher said, with 26 buses and a smaller increase in service hours.

As he wrote down suggestions on a sheet of paper, Buff Brown became animated about one suggestion from his group member.

“I love it. I love it,” said Brown, who founded Bloomington Transportation Options for People, which promotes the use and funding of alternative transportation.

Brown mentioned that none of the options presented took into account the presumed merging of Bloomington Transit and Campus Bus Services in the near future.

Another idea for Bloomington Transit, Fletcher said in his presentation, would be a “park and ride shuttle,” which would allow people who don’t like riding the bus to drive to a location, park and ride a shuttle downtown.

“Park and ride makes the system more attractive to choice riders,” Fletcher said.

He added that another option may be a $1 to $2 million “signal priority” system for buses, which would coordinate traffic lights with bus arrivals to make trips easier to make and a little faster in riders’ minds. This could also include changing certain streets to have specific bus lanes – an option Fletcher said he didn’t think was feasible in Bloomington.

But Brown’s opinion differed - he said he thinks certain streets could probably be split into car and bus lanes.

May said he was glad to see a variety of people at the meeting who were serious about having their opinions heard.

“Whether it be folks from IU, city planning… you’ve got a different mix of representatives from different public agencies,” he said.