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    New Plan for Indianola Keeps Bike Lanes, Adds Parking

    The city of Columbus has updated its plan to reconfigure a 1.2-mile stretch of Indianola Avenue in Clintonville. The new plan, which was emailed out to residents and other interested stakeholders last week, keeps the continuous bike lanes from the most-recent design, while adding more parking on the east side of the street near the business district (the stretch of Indianola between Midgard and Weber roads that is home to over a dozen shops and businesses).

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    Also added is a crosswalk and an expanded sidewalk – with bike parking – in front of Studio 35 Cinema & Drafthouse. As in the previous plan, the existing median would be removed, but the new plan is able to fit in the additional parking and the expanded sidewalk by also removing the center turn lane for cars turning onto Milford Avenue.

    Two bus stops, one on each side of the street, will be moved under the new plan.

    Emma Kogge, a Transportation Planner in the city’s Division of Traffic Management, said that the “precise locations [of the new stops] are still being finalized with COTA, but stops currently located within the business block will be consolidated with existing stops between Weber and Tibet, and between Midgard and Como.”

    The city began studying this stretch of Indianola in early 2021, eventually releasing its initial proposed design in the fall of that year. That proposal called for bike lanes along most of the corridor, but with one significant exception – within the business district, cyclists would have been forced to merge out of the bike lanes and into a single traffic lane that they would share with cars. Under that plan, parking spaces on both sides of the street would have been preserved, as would the landscaped median in the middle of the street.

    Comments from bike advocates and others led the city to make changes; the most significant of which removed parking along the east side of Indianola within the business district, allowing the bike lanes to be continuous. That second plan, however, was opposed by many of the businesses owners along the stretch, who balked at the removal of parking.

    The new plan is essentially the third iteration of changes proposed for the street, and city officials have indicated that this is the one that will be moving forward. Implementation is now planned for 2024, when the Ohio Department of Transportation (ODOT) will be resurfacing Indianola from North Broadway to Hudson Street.

    Josh Lapp, the Board Chair of Transit Columbus – one of the groups that advocated for continuous bike lanes – called the latest plan “a step in the right direction,” but added that, “our expectation is that future projects [in the city] will incorporate even better, safer, separated and protected bike lanes.”   

    “We do see positive features in the final plan…the decreased crossing width and center turn lane removal are all positive changes,” he said. “While we maintain that the parking removal would not have negatively impacted the business district, especially with the increase in pedestrians and cyclists that will result from a safer street, we hope that this plan accomplishes the goals of the businesses in the area and that they will now support safe streets for cyclists and pedestrians.”

    Studio 35 owner Eric Brembeck, who organized a group of fellow business owners to speak out against the city’s second proposed alignment, did not immediately reply to a request for comment on the new plan.

    More information on the Indianola Complete Streets Study is available here. All images provided by the city of Columbus.

    A rendering showing the proposed realignment of Indianola Avenue.
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    Brent Warren
    Brent Warrenhttps://columbusunderground.com/author/brent-warren
    Brent Warren is a staff reporter for Columbus Underground covering urban development, transportation, city planning, neighborhoods, and other related topics. He grew up in Grandview Heights, lives in the University District and studied City and Regional Planning at OSU.
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