This column by @JamesEBriggs is flat out terrible - bad. https://www.indystar.com/story/opinion/columnists/james-briggs/2020/10/06/transportation-indianapolis-electric-buses-red-line-failed/3629608001/

There are plenty of legit problems to critique on the Red Line (and the coronavirus has hit transit hard) but even with its many problems, the Red Line is a big success so far.

The Red Line is a game changer for transit in Indy, making riding the bus a viable and sensible choice for those along its route - even those who can afford a car.

My family is a one car family because we live in proximity to downtown and along the Red Line.

As someone with years of living car free and riding transit in major cities like NYC and Chicago, I can tell you that the Red Line is was good or better than the bulk of bus service in those cities (at least pre-pandemic).

Riding the bus in Indy no longer means having to check the schedule, standing at a shelterless bus stop, and hoping your bus comes. Just go to the Red Line station and get on the next bus. Even my max burn wait time wasn’t that bad.

Also, the Red Line was practically free to build - $95 million but the feds paid 80% meaning Indy spent less than $20 million of its own money.

That money also went to replace old traffic signals, fix up curbs and sidewalks, and repave much of College and Shelby - things that desperately needed to be done anyway.

Ridership was below expectations pre-coronavirus, but projections were contingent on the rollout of the new network, which had not been completed. Transit is a network that relies on network effects.

If you want to talk about a failure, look at I-69 between Evansville and Bloomington. Much of the route has traffic levels not that much higher than the Red Line but how many _billions_ of dollars did that cost? That’s an actual failure.

And the Red Line’s traffic isn’t that much less than the new Louisville East End bridge across the Ohio River that the state built for over a _billion_ dollars. That’s another actual failure.

IndyGo made plenty of mistakes on the Red Line. The buses were probably a bad choice but hardly make the Red Line a failure.

It’s notable that Briggs talks about how long charges last and the like, he doesn’t cite a single operational statistic or impact of the buses that would matter to an actual rider. Maybe there are some, but he didn’t mention them.

Given that Briggs source for his claims is statements about the buses by IndyGo’s own CEO, perhaps he also could have asked her whether she thinks those problems mean the Red Line as a whole is a failure. Would she agree? I doubt it.