China has its Great Wall.  And now the West Side of Indianapolis is apparently getting its own version, courtesy of INDOT.  When the agency starts restricting traffic on Crawfordsville Road under I-465, that will mean that five consecutive interchanges or over/underpasses on 465 will either be closed or squeezed by the dreaded orange barrels.

  West Side drivers want to know, “How will I get to work?”  Or, “How will my kids get to school?”  State Rep. Phil Hinkle, R-Indianapolis, wants to know how a state agency can arbitrarily close or narrow every east-west artery in Wayne Township.  And the schools there say they’re having trouble getting the buses around on time, since every road that crosses 465 has big back-ups, even at non-rush hour.  The big question is:  Can’t they wait until some of these bridges are done before doing others?

  INDOT has some legitimate arguments on its side.  The big Accelerate 465 project requires that several of these bridges be altered to accommodate a wider interstate highway. Three interchanges…Rockville Road, Tenth St., and 21st St…involve overpass bridges.  And if you did them one at a time, it would take three construction seasons.  But Washington Street involves an underpass.  Couldn’t that wait?  And the work on Crawfordsville involves no interchange at all, just a place where it goes under 465.  Surely that could be put off a while.

  Of course, all this assumes that INDOT places a priority on the convenience of the customers, the taxpayers who provide the money for its road-building.  But time and again (Remember Super 70 when INDOT stubbornly refused to pull up the orange barrels on sections that had long since been finished?) we’ve seen sadly that that isn’t the case.