Seventh Street runs right through the heart of downtown Bloomington, serving as a vital east-west corridor for the city.
It is also one of the most dangerous stretches in the city — especially for cyclists.
Around 9:30 a.m. Jan. 29, a cyclist collided with a Bloomington Transit bus on the 7-Line bicycle lane, sending him to the hospital with minor injuries.
He’s not alone.
“I live right on Seventh Street, and I just hear all the crashes that are going on a regular basis, or the near misses,” said Craig Medlyn, a local cyclist.
Medlyn is also a lecturer in the Kelley School of Business’ Management and Entrepreneurship department and is a member of the Bloomington Bicycle Club.
Craig Medlyn offers safety tips for cyclists and talks about his involvement with the Bloomington Bicycle Club.
After construction of the 7-Line in 2021, the City of Bloomington removed stop signs at several intersections along Seventh Street, but City Engineer Andrew Cibor signed a 180-day order in late February to bring them back.
“What we found was when we removed them, just the number of crashes at the intersections really skyrocketed,” he said. “When we do projects, we hope that we’re reducing crashes, and so it had the opposite effect of what we were trying.”
Cibor’s order calls for stop signs to return to the intersections at Morton, Washington, Lincoln and Grant Streets through late-August.
This is not the first time the city has tried to bring back the stop signs.
Cibor issued a similar 180-day order in April 2023 to reinstall stop signs at the corner of Seventh and Dunn Streets.
City Council added Lincoln, Morton and Washington Streets to an ordinance six months later, which passed in a tight 5-4 vote in Nov. 2023. Then-Mayor John Hamilton vetoed the ordinance, saying he only wanted stop signs to return at Seventh and Dunn Streets.
One year later in Nov. 2024, City Council passed an ordinance for that stop sign, but the crashes continue to rise.
“One of the reasons to wait that I heard was, ‘people are still adapting, and if we wait longer, the crashes will start going down,'” Cibor said. “That just did not happen.”
Andrew Cibor talks about the history of Seventh Street’s stop signs, urban development in Bloomington, and alternatives for the 7-Line closure.
This is not the only change on Seventh Street.
The portion of the 7-Line between Grant and Dunn Streets is closed through November due to construction of an $81 million development at the former Poplars site.
The 158-unit, six-story building will include graduate housing, a fitness center and study spaces. Construction is expected to last through March 2026.
Cibor said the city considered several alternatives, including turning Seventh Street into a one-way and converting the other lane into a bike lane. That option would have closed transit access to the Indiana Memorial Union, which the city did not want to do.
He said the city chose the best of two bad options in closing the bike lane.
“It really is needed to stage equipment, to put in a crane, to bring in concrete trucks,” he said. “That space is physically needed to build the building.”
Medlyn said the city did the right thing, and — at the end of the day — safety should be the number one priority.
“Cyclists are human,” he said. “We’ve got family and things of that nature. We want to get to point-to-point safely just like everybody else.”
Cibor agreed.
“As an engineer, I feel like it’s my ethical responsibility to prioritize safety above convenience,” he said. “Just feeling like this will reduce the number of crashes and ultimately make our city safer.”
