More than 18,000 people commute to or from Delaware County each day, logging hundreds of highway miles each week on their personal vehicles.
It's a different landscape from some 20 years ago when commuter rails and trains passed through Muncie several times a day. Roger Hollands, Linda Muckway and others of the Anderson-Muncie Commuter Rail Coalition are hoping to change that, starting with a stronger regional bus system and hopefully building up to a railway between Muncie and Indianapolis.
Muckway, 53, said it's difficult to find a bus company that can accommodate her wheelchair.
"The Star of America's got a pretty direct route," she said, "if you can walk onto the bus."
She's going to see the Circle of Lights at Monument Circle in Indianapolis on Friday, and she had to set up transportation with Miller Trailways weeks in advance, she said.
Muckway calls herself a disabilities advocate. She grew up in Michigan City, Ind., where she was used to riding the South Shore Train between South Bend and Chicago, and she wishes that Muncie had a similar rail system.
Hollands, a professor emeritus of political science at Ball State, has similar childhood memories of trains and buses as a main source of transportation. He grew up in Milwaukee and remembers taking cross-country trips with his family when he was seven and eight years old.
"I enjoy all forms of public transportation — planes, buses, street cars," he said. "In 1985, the last Greyhound stopped serving Muncie. Then there was virtually nothing."
In the short run, Hollands wants a stronger bus service between Indianapolis and Noblesville, a goal that's in line with Indy Connect, a coalition of Indianapolis-based commuter services.
In the long run, he wants to see a railway system that connects the two cities and later Anderson and Muncie. It'll be an uphill battle, though, to garner funds and support.
Creating a system that connects people around Central Indiana will cost about $2.5 million over the next 25 years, and it will cost $135 million per year to operate and maintain the system, according to the Indy Connect website.
State legislators disagree on the practicality of a railway system between Indianapolis and Noblesville, let alone a rail that connects to Muncie as well. The timing isn't right, Luke Kenley, R-Noblesville, said.
"Everybody's kind of agreed this is a pretty big tax expenditure," he said. "It needs a referendum. If they do that right now, everyone will vote to kill it."
Representative Terri Austin, chair of the House Standing Committee on Roads and Transportation, agrees funding is an issue. She said the longer Indiana waits to improve public transportation, the more it will be at a disadvantage.
"There's a variety of ways you can put a better public transportation system in place," she said. "We can't build our way out of congestion."
The Northeast Corridor, including Delaware and surrounding counties, is the most densely-used by commuters, Hollands said. According to IT-40 tax returns from 2008, more than 8,000 people commute from Delaware County and almost 10,000 commute into the county, mostly from Madison and Randolph counties. He wants to see public transportation capitalize on all that traffic.
"The important thing is if you put a system in place and the ridership, the public, accepts it, then there's sort of a cry of demand," he said. "People throughout the region say, ‘Well, I'd like to have the rail line out to my community too.'"
Instead, we continue to use cars as a main source of transportation, or — for those with disabilities – we bear the obstacles of public transportation.
"We all kind of go it alone," Holland said. "There are possibilities for change, and these are things a lot of our folks [with Anderson-Muncie Commuter Rail Coalition] are looking at."
Next meeting of the Anderson-Muncie Commuter Rail Coalition-
5-6:30 p.m.
Dec. 17
Kennedy Library
1700 W. McGalliard Rd., Muncie
Indy Connect's plan to expand public transportation:
Triple the bus service
Offer bus rapid transit that runs every 10-15 minutes
Offer rail transit between Marion County and surrounding counties
Create bike and pedestrian pathways across Indiana
Expand, maintain and improve roadways and bridges
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