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2015–2017
Smart Streets was the Buttigieg administration's downtown wager: more than $20 million, much of it tax-increment financing, to convert the one-way streets that had funneled traffic through downtown since the 1970s — Main Street and St. Joseph Street among them — back to two-way traffic, with curbs, bike lanes, and traffic calming meant to make the center a place to stop rather than pass through. Construction ran from the spring of 2015 to November 2016. The opposition was documented in the press of record as it went: residents objected to traffic deliberately slowed and familiar routes broken up, and the mayor conceded the friction in his own words, writing in the Tribune that after dozens of public meetings and several votes, "not everyone is a fan." The project's engineering judgment is what turned a policy argument into the administration's hardest public episode.
A 2015 study by American Structurepoint, the city's engineering consultant, found the traffic signal at South and Michigan streets unwarranted under the applicable standards, and on February 1, 2016, the city bagged the light — covered it, pending removal. The neighborhood's response was sustained and organized, and the city reversed itself: through the spring of 2016 it planned replacement signals, and on August 23, 2016, the Board of Public Works approved the contract change order to install them. The signals had not yet been activated in January 2017 when, days before the planned activation, an 11-year-old boy was struck and killed crossing at that corner.
The mayor defended the process in public. Buttigieg expressed his condolences and stood by the engineers: the removal had followed a professional study and the signal standards, the reversal had followed the community's voice, and the death occurred inside the gap between the two — a sequence he presented as the system working as designed, at a speed that events outran. Critics, in the same press record, treated the episode as the initiative's methods made visible. The signals were installed and activated, Smart Streets was completed, and the administration later credited the conversion with drawing more than $90 million in private investment downtown — the mayor's figure, printed here as his. No finding against the engineers or the city arose from the corner; what the record holds is the study, the reversal, and the timing, which no party to the dispute has ever described differently.
Sources:
- American Structurepoint, 2015 traffic-signal study (South and Michigan streets), as reported in the South Bend Tribune
- South Bend Board of Public Works, change-order approval, August 23, 2016
- South Bend Tribune, coverage of the signal removal and reversal, 2016, and of the January 2017 fatality
- Government Technology, January 25, 2017, reporting the mayor's public defense of the engineers and the initiative
- Mayor Pete Buttigieg, op-ed, South Bend Tribune