Preparing for a Transit Tax Increase in Indianapolis, Indiana
Thirty-six cities, towns, and counties fall under the umbrella of the Indianapolis Metropolitan Planning Area — ”basically everyone in a fairly large area around Indianapolis,” says Sean Northrup, Assistant Director of Indy MPO. His organization’s board also unites representatives from the Central Indiana Regional Transit Authority, IndyGo (Indianapolis’ transit operator), and the airport and port authorities, all of which touch about 1.3 million people.
Building support and preparing for the referendum
Besides granting out roughly $45 million yearly in federal funds for jurisdictions to spend on the construction of roads, bridges, and sidewalks, Indy MPO maintains a federally mandated 25-year long-range plan and collects and funds planning programming in five-year increments to advance that plan. It’s standard procedure for a metropolitan planning organization, and in the mix right now is a potential tax increase to fund fixed-route service in Hamilton County.
With two cities of over 80,000 people each, the suburban county, north of Indianapolis, is one of the fastest-growing areas in the state. The referendum to increase income taxes by a quarter of a cent could be voted on as soon as September by residents of Hamilton County and Marion County (whose fixed-route service is provided by IndyGo).
Indy MPO used Remix to research, design, and plan Hamilton County’s potential fixed-route service in advance of the referendum.
KEY RESULTS WITH REMIX
1. Guiding stakeholders with a dose of reality
“The questions that we have to answer before we go out and ask the public that question is, what does a quarter of a cent buy me?” says Jeremy Moore, a senior planner at Indy MPO. “We do the calculations on our own and give that information to a group called the Hamilton County Transit Forum, which is a collective action group that got together to produce a transit plan for Hamilton County.” Particularly useful for this purpose was Remix’s demographic layers and costing calculations: “They looked at network design and governance and public engagement. We gave them a budget, basically, and they then designed a few different iterations of what a transit network could look like in Hamilton County and, by using Remix, they were able to make sure that the projections were realistic, they weren’t putting too much or too little service on the street, they could see the demographics for it, everything like that,” says Sean.
2. Developing 7 different scenarios for 7 different funding levels
“We do everything on the map,” says Jeremy, “and then check the data as we go, so we price routes and figure out, ideally, what route would you want and how much would that route cost? And then we can make quick adjustments to the frequency, which is really helpful.” Indy MPO has created scenarios for seven different types of funding levels. “It’s been really nice, because we’ve been able to bounce back and forth between those different scenarios and show exactly how much service they’re getting for each one of them,” Jeremy says. Once the map is ready to show publicly, he’ll export Remix maps as shapefiles and create maps as a combination of GIS and Adobe Illustrator.
3. Eliminating a six-figure consultant project
Using Remix has eliminated the need for a consultant to assess what Hamilton County would get with its potential tax increase. “We did this in-house. Remix allowed Jeremy to do the vast majority of this work himself. If we would have bid this out, I can’t imagine it would have cost less than $100,000 or $150,000, and we were able to do this in-house,” says Sean. The two think that, had they pursued this project without Remix, they would have needed some combination of financial model, GIS, and a Python algorithm, which would have required much more time and effort.
“It would’ve been really onerous to try and do! There are just some projects that the MPO uses funds to hire a consultant for, and that may have been what we ended up doing until this came along,” Jeremy says. “We felt we had sufficient capacity, especially because of the time-saving features of Remix that we could get this accomplished with our staff.”
I think it’s pretty safe to say what we’ve done, because of having Remix, we would not have been able to do without it. The difference is between doing it and not doing it, in a sense. Without Remix, it would’ve been impossible.
Sean believes that, beyond the time saved, Remix enabled this project to exist in the first place: “I think it’s pretty safe to say what we’ve done, because of having Remix, we would not have been able to do without it. The difference is between doing it and not doing it, in a sense. Without Remix, it would’ve been impossible.”
