What downtown Indianapolis is like

[robotech_master]

So, I find myself in Indianapolis. ("This is not my beautiful house!")

I've lived here for five days, and it's definitely interesting. I've never had the chance to live and work in a big city before, and I love it! Work is pretty awesome, too.

Things I like about the city so far:

• Bike lanes! In Springfield, they're pretty much an afterthought. A couple of major streets have them, and you can get by on the sidewalk on a lot of others, but mostly it feels like you take your life in your hands. But here, a lot of major streets have bike lanes. And where in a lot of places bike lanes cut out when the right side of the road is needed for turn lanes, a lot of the streets in Indianapolis have bike lanes that continue running between the right-most forward lane and the right-turn lane. What an amazing innovation! (Of course, this means you could potentially get creamed by a car changing lanes, but you can't have everything.)


• The traffic signals all count down their time to change. A few of the ones in Springfield did that, but it's a common thing here. This is useful, since it lets me know whether I have time to go ahead and cross on my bike despite the orange flashing hand. If it's at least 4 or 5 seconds, I'm good.


• Bus service coverage. Indianapolis is a huge city by the standards of places I've lived before. But its bus service is top-notch. I honestly think that there's more coverage of the different areas within the city, percentage-wise, than Springfield's bus routes offered. I haven't yet found a place I wanted to go within Indianapolis proper that I couldn't get within a couple of blocks of on one bus or another. (The coverage out in Greenwood where my brother lives was pretty much the opposite; I had to bike three miles just to catch the bus into town. But, on the other hand, as far outside of the central city as that is, it's kind of miraculous I can even get that close.)


• Everything's so close together! A few blocks in one way, I have a decent coffee shop and a Kroger's. (Kind of a nothing little Kroger's, though. It doesn't even have liquor sales. But it has the basic grocery staples.) The same distance in another direction, I have a CVS, a Walgreen, a McDonald's, a White Castle, and another coffee shop/beer-and-wine bar. A couple blocks in another direction, and on my way to work, is the Indianapolis Public Library. A couple blocks in another direction is a liquor store my brother tells me is top notch. A mile or so away there's a Dollar General and another liquor store. And a mile or so in another direction is my job, and the heart of the downtown area—including the convention center where GenCon is held every year. For the first time, I don't have to worry about parking fees, or commuting to my brother's house while attending it.
  
  I've never been so close to so much before! Today, in search of a dishpan and drying rack to supplement my sink and let me wash all the dishes I've been unpacking, I went to Kroger, CVS, Walgreen, and finally had to go another mile to get to the Dollar General. But all that biking was still less biking or walking than it would have taken to get to the nearest big grocery store in Springfield. (Well, until the last year or so I was there and a Wal-Mart Neighborhood Market opened practically right next to me, anyway.)

Things I'm less enthusiastic about:

• Bus service bureaucracy. I keep running into all these little gotchas that Springfield's bus service didn't have. You can't transfer from one line to another by paying a dime as you could in Springfield; you have to buy a new ticket, or else buy a $4 daily pass to ride as often as you want. And you can't get on a southbound bus near the end of its line to keep out of the rain longer if you're actually going north; they want another payment at the end of the line. (In Springfield, you could pay once and ride the same bus all day long if you wanted.) And the bus routes are so complicated, and the route maps they provide so confusing, that I honestly don't think I could find my way from place to place without the aid of the Navigate program in Google Maps on my phone. But hey. $4 to go anywhere in town, all day long? That's not so bad, even if it does take a while to get there.


• City of jaywalkers. I don't know if it's an Indianapolis thing or a big city thing, but it seems like people here are on a hair trigger when it comes to crossing the street. As soon as the opposing light goes red, off they go without waiting the 4 or 5 seconds more for the "walk" sign. I don't recall seeing that behavior so much in Springfield. Though, then again, I didn't spend that much time in the Springfield downtown area, and I'm living near the heart of Indy downtown. Given how I've already seen a number of cars flagrantly run red lights after they've changed, I'm surprised these combined behaviors don't lead to more accidents.


• Some stuff is so far away! I got to thinking about Tampopo the other day, and checked to see if there was a real ramen noodle place I could go in town and experience "real" non-instant ramen for the first time. As it turns out, there is! It's in the northeast corner of town, just short of a whole hour away from me by bus. (Though the bus that goes there is the same one that goes right by my apartment, so I wouldn't have to change buses even once. That's something, anyway.)
  
  Other things in that part of town include Trader Joe's, the World Market, an interesting-sounding second-hand-book store/bar I'd like to visit, Fry's Electronics, the arthouse theater where I went to see The Wind Rises and Tim's Vermeer, the other job I interviewed for at the same time I took this one (boy, glad I didn't go for that one, it would have been inconvenient), and the Indianapolis furry convention IndyFurCon that's coming up in a couple of months. And a couple of those are at least a couple of miles beyond where that bus service ends. Yeesh.
  
  At some point I guess I should see about getting a car again. Though my folks had the great idea that maybe I should just rent one once a month or so for doing errands I'd saved up, like buying bulky purchases or going places across town. That bears consideration. (Actually, I'd most like a motor scooter again, for the convenience without the high operating costs—I even have some store credit on tap with a Springfield dealership—but something tells me my family would put their collective foot down after what I did to my leg with the last one.)

Anyway, that's life in the big city right now. I've managed to get a lot of things unpacked in the new apartment, though there's much still left to do. But I need more shelf space and more drawer space before I can unpack my books, DVDs, CDs, and clothes. I want a futon, too, for use as a TV-watching sofa or by guests to sleep on. And there are more blinds and things to be mounted; Alex is coming over tomorrow after work; we'll see what we can accomplish.