College-Walnut corridor study: public meetings announced for October 2025

Two public meetings are now scheduled on the future of the College-Walnut corridor: Tuesday, Oct. 28, and Thursday, Oct. 30.

The two parallel streets currently form a one-way pair. College Avenue is one-way south, while Walnut Street is one-way north. One possibility is to make both streets two-way.

Both October meetings will be held as open houses in the Bloomington city council chambers, starting at 5:30 p.m. They will essentially be “the same meeting twice”—the idea being to give the public two different chances to provide their perspective on two alternatives.

That was the news out of Monday’s regular meeting of Bloomington’s plan commission.

The update on the next steps for the College-Walnut study came from planning services manager Ryan Robling, who briefed plan commissioners on the long-in-the-works project. After a period of relative quiet, when the project might have seemed dormant, staff have been working on it in the background, Robling said.

Robling told commissioners that design proposals for the corridor had been narrowed down to two different options, and that feedback will be sought on those two proposals.

Robling confirmed to The B Square after the meeting that both proposals include significant changes, intended to improve safety, including one that would leave both streets as one-way. The second alternative would make both streets two-way.

Based on previous meetings on the study, changes that could be common to either approach include: bringing sidewalks into ADA-compliance; filling sidewalk gaps; adding curb ramps; adding protected bike lanes; adding traffic calming features like street trees and curb extensions.

Chances for feedback will not be limited to the late October meetings, Robling told plan commissioners. There will also be popup events to be held along the corridor, which stretches from the confluence of Walnut and College at the State Road 45/46 bypass southward to the vicinity of Dodds Street, where the roadways come together again. It’s about a 2.2-mile stretch.

Robling told commissioners that they might be asked to hold a special meeting in late November or early December to focus exclusively on the corridor study, rather than including it among several items on a regular meeting agenda.

The College-Walnut corridor is the main north-south route through the city. Each street carries on average 7,500-17,500 vehicles a day, depending on where the count is made.

After seeing a lot of activity in 2023, Bloomington’s study of the College Avenue and Walnut Street corridor saw no public sign of life for more than a year.

But in April, at a board of public works meeting, the study received a boost in funding and an expanded scope of work. The original contract with Toole Design Group, to do the corridor study, was approved in 2022 for $170,000. The action earlier this year, by the three-member board of public works, authorized $94,682 more, for a total of $264,682.

The additional money was supposed to be used for an expanded scope of work, which among other things now includes an additional 23 intersections—beyond the four main intersections that were originally selected for analysis.

In April, Robling told the board of public workds that the additional analysis is meant to ensure that turning movements and traffic through all the intersections in the corridor will be viable with either of the two alternatives that could be recommended.