Route 13 bus service could end March 8, but Monroe County funding might keep it alive

Bloomington Transit’s Route 13, which runs from downtown to Ivy Tech and Cook Medical, outside of city limits, could cease operation in early March, due to a lack of funding, but there is a strong chance that it could be preserved.

What makes the situation sound dire is a formal notice of service cessation published by Bloomington Transit (BT) early February, which says Route 13 will stop running as of March 8. A formal public hearing will take place at 5 p.m. on Feb. 24, at the Grimes Lane administrative headquarters which is a half hour before the regular BT board meeting starts.

What gives the route a strong chance of surviving gets a mention in the notice of cession itself. The notice says Route 13 is due to stop service “[d]ue to the withdrawal of required funding from Monroe County …” The funding could, in fact, be forthcoming from the county government.

That will depend on action in the coming weeks by both the county council and the county commissioners. The county council, as the fiscal body, will have to approve the money, while the commissioners, as the executive branch, will have to approve a contract.

Preservation of the route will also depend on a certain amount of faith on BT’s part, that the county government will provide the funding, even if the money is not actually in place before the BT board makes its decision on Feb. 24.

The BT board will also almost certainly factor in the fact that after one year of operation, the route has not met expectations for ridership—it lags far behind every other route in BT’s system.

Based on the county council’s discussion this past Tuesday (Feb. 10), the council is prepared to make the needed appropriation—likely from the economic development local income tax fund.

And based on answers to B Square questions from commissioners Julie Thomas and Jody Madeira, they are both prepared to back the funding with a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with BT to provide the service. But Thomas was clear this past Thursday, when asked about the topic after the regular meeting of the commissioners: “The council needs to appropriate money. We’re not going to sign a contract unless the council appropriates money.”

Based on the Feb. 10 county council discussion, a council action to appropriate the money would not come until its March 10 meeting, due to published notice requirements for appropriations. That means the approval of an MOU by commissioners would not come until March 12.

Thomas pointed out that she had raised the issue of funding Route 13 at the Aug. 26, 2025 budget work session with the county council, when she put “a marker on table” warning that funding this year might have to come from the county’s general fund, instead of ARPA (American Rescue Plan Act) funding, which was the source for 2025, the route’s first year of operation.

The amount of funding needed, based on the county council’s discussion, is $184,000.

The reason some funding from the county government is needed to support Route 13 is tied to the fact that it runs part of the way outside city limits. When Bloomington’s city council in 2023 finally made it legally possible for BT to provide service outside city limits, a stipulation was baked into the council’s ordinance, which forces BT to use non-city funds to support service outside Bloomington.

Ridership: County council’s Feb. 10 discussion

Councilor Trent Deckard framed the route as a jobs and education lifeline: “The only way back for us is putting people into work, putting people into education, to get to work, and getting families kind of moving about the county.”

Councilor Kate Wiltz acknowledged the poor ridership on the route, but said one year of data on a new, suburban‑extension route is not much of a test: “We only have one year of ridership. That’s not long to test out whether or not this is something that the people will climb on to, and yet it sounds like it’s a regularly used route by at least some people.”

Council president Jennifer Crossley focused on outreach and awareness, saying even people who could use Route 13 don’t necessarily know it exists: “As a mom of a child that goes to Ivy Tech, my kid didn’t even realize that there was a thing, besides me having to express to her, get out the house, go, catch the bus and go to campus.” Crossley added, “I’m very curious to know how we are getting that information out.”

On the question of numbers, Deckard pointed to the 12,857 passenger trips on the route in 2025 as a substantial number. Councilor David Henry did some back-of-the-napkin calculations to arrive at maybe 17 or 18 daily round-trip riders, pointing out that it is useful to distinguish between “trips versus humans.” Henry noted that building ridership on a new route is a multi-year effort. Henry said, “It probably takes a very long time to get the culture around taking a bus through White Hall on the way to Ivy Tech there.” He added, “It probably takes time to get that ridership up.”

Ridership: January BT board meeting

At the January meeting of the BT board, Route 13 got some discussion, but not in the context of adequate funding. The focus at the Jan. 20 board meeting was on an evaluation of key performance indicators (KPIs) including ridership.

The ridership on Route 13 was a grave concern for BT board president James McLary. “The only question is the Ivy Tech route, which is, I mean, it’s ugly,” he said. By the actual numbers, Route 13 in December had 2.78 passengers per hour, which was dead last among all routes, with the next-worst Route 4 (West Bloomfield Rd) coming in at 7.04 passengers per hour. Systemwide, the average of all routes for 2025 was 25.19 passengers per hour.

Special projects manager Shelley Strimaitis told McLary there’s a consensus among BT staff that Route 13 “can’t be left the way it is,” and said options being weighed include redesigning the route or switching to different kinds of service. A partially built apartment complex on the corridor could eventually boost demand, she said.

After the January BT board meeting, responding to a B Square question, Strimaitis said she knows there are some riders who have come to rely on the service since it was introduced at the start of the year, and that she does not want to just eliminate the route based on a statistic, without thinking it through.