A vacant lot at West 29th and Elmira streets that has spent recent years collecting illegal dumping and trash is about to become a place where Indianapolis kids learn to ride bikes and navigate traffic safely. The Bicycle Skills and Safety Park, built by the nonprofit Nine13sports, is on track to open in October, according to founder Tom Hanley, who said the site had been a magnet for trash and other illicit activity before construction began.
The facility carries an official name that has not been widely reported until now: the Jim Douglas Skills and Safety Park. As Towne Post Network reported, the park honors a close friend of Hanley's who was killed in a 2010 automobile collision on Hanley's own wedding day, when a shuttle bus carrying the wedding party was struck by another vehicle. Nine13sports has not publicized that backstory widely, but it explains why this particular stretch of pavement carries personal weight for the organization's founder.
According to WFYI Public Media, the park will feature two tracks — one paved and one dirt — each designed with different intersection types and obstacles that let riders simulate real traffic situations safely. Staff members will be on hand to teach people how to ride, and Nine13sports plans to loan out several dozen bikes and protective equipment for use inside the park, including children's bikes, adult bikes, recumbent bikes and hand bikes. The idea is to equip kids with the skills to use Indianapolis' transportation infrastructure safely once they leave the park's fenced-in tracks.
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Hanley, a four-time national champion track cyclist at Marian University, founded Nine13sports in 2011 to use bicycles as an educational and health tool for urban youth, per the same Towne Post account. He pivoted toward youth cycling advocacy after surviving the 2010 crash that ended his competitive racing career — the same collision that killed Jim Douglas. The organization says its mission is to promote biking access for people from all socio-economic backgrounds.
Beyond the new skills park, Nine13sports has run a program called Kids Building Bikes since 2018, letting students in fourth grade and above learn bicycle repair and keep the bike they assemble by the end of the course. That effort complements the group's stationary gym riding and multi-week summer bike camps, the Towne Post report notes, painting a picture of a broader youth programming ecosystem that the new park now extends onto real pavement.
Traffic Gardens Have a Long, Global History
What Nine13sports built is traditionally known as a traffic garden, a concept with roots going back nearly a century. The first American version, called a Safety Town, was painted by police officer Frend Boals in Mansfield, Ohio in 1937, featuring miniature streets, buildings and functional traffic signals, according to Traffic Garden Designs. Safety Towns spread across Midwestern communities through the mid-20th century, while similar traffic gardens were popular around Europe during the same era, before modern urban planners revived the concept. Traffic gardens are now used in several U.S. cities, and Indianapolis' region already has hundreds of miles of multi-use trails, rail trails and separated bike routes, per WFYI.
Nine13sports estimates the park's construction cost at around $500,000, Hanley told WFYI, and recent rain slightly delayed the build. The nonprofit partnered with Keep Indianapolis Beautiful and the CIBA Foundation to bring the project to a lot that had previously sat undeveloped.
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The project also drew support from Indiana University Indianapolis' Diabetes Impact Project, a partnership that signals the park is intended as more than recreation. Known as DIP-IN, the initiative is a $12 million, eight-year health effort launched in 2018 by the IU Fairbanks School of Public Health to target neighborhoods like Near Northwest, where adult diabetes prevalence runs 60% higher than the national average, according to Indiana University. Funded by Eli Lilly and Company, DIP-IN relies on resident-led steering committees to direct funding toward neighborhood physical activity and health improvements, making the bike park as much a public health tool as a recreational one.
Anthony Cherolis, executive director of Central Indiana Cycling, has advocated for the park's role in local youth mobility. His organization formed in early 2025 through the merger of two long-standing regional advocacy groups, the Central Indiana Bicycling Association and Bike Indianapolis, and now represents more than 750 members pushing for connected greenways and traffic-calmed streets across the region, according to Central Indiana Cycling.
The Safety Numbers Behind the Push
The timing lines up with sobering local traffic data. The Indianapolis Vision Zero Task Force's annual report found that 85 people died in traffic crashes across the city in 2025, with pedestrians and bicyclists together accounting for more than 30% of all road fatalities, as reported by WTHR. Total traffic deaths have dropped from a pandemic-era peak of more than 120 in 2021, but deaths among people walking and biking remain disproportionately high. The city launched a public Vision Zero dashboard in 2026 to track high-injury corridors, according to ThatCarHitMe.com, after geographic analysis found that just 5% of Indianapolis streets — 205 miles out of 8,400 total lane miles — account for nearly half of all fatal and incapacitating crashes citywide.
Cyclist-specific numbers add further context. Indianapolis recorded 54 bicycle accidents and 180 pedestrian collisions involving motor vehicles in 2024, averaging roughly four reported bicycle crashes per month, per Safe Roads USA, with drivers failing to yield the right of way cited as the leading factor. Rising injuries among younger riders have also shown up at the region's children's hospital: Riley Children's Health logged 17 e-bike-related pediatric injuries by July 1, up from 12 the year before, four in 2024, and zero in 2023, as Hoodline previously reported. Several Central Indiana suburbs have since enacted stricter trail and street ordinances for young riders in response.
Questions remain about how the Jim Douglas Skills and Safety Park will function day to day once it opens this fall. It is not yet clear how Nine13sports will coordinate transportation or school field trips to bring youth to the site, how the loaned bikes will be managed on location, or whether the city's Quick Build or Vision Zero teams plan to connect bike lanes so neighborhood kids can safely ride to and from the park on their own, according to WFYI.
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