Traffic moves along State Road 135 in Greenwood on Jan. 15, 2010.
Daily Journal Archives
News from around Johnson County as reported on Jan. 18 in the pages of the Daily Journal and the Franklin Evening Star from the last 112 years.
On this day in 2010, the main story on the front page of the Daily Journal was about county’s residents commuting to work.
The average Johnson County resident spent more than 200 hours a year driving to work, data from the Central Indiana Regional Transportation Authority and the U.S. Census Bureau showed.
Long commutes lengthened work days and ran up gas bills, but gave people the freedom to live and work where they wanted, local commuters said.
Johnson County had an advantage over other metro Indianapolis counties though. State Road 135, U.S. 31 and Interstate 65 all provided direct and relatively uncongested paths to downtown, Bargersville Planning Director Jonathan Issacs said.
The average Johnson County resident lived about 24 minutes from work, which was the average distance for residents of the nine-county metro area surrounding Indianapolis, according to the study.
Regardless of where they lived, anyone commuting in the Indianapolis area usually had a shorter, less stressful drive than residents of larger coastal cities, Issacs said. Commuters in suburbs of other big cities, like Chicago, spent an average of a half hour or more one-way, according to U.S. Census data.
But some county residents still faced a lengthy commute, especially since so many jobs were clustered on the northside, Isaacs said. More than 700 Johnson County residents drove to jobs in Carmel, Fishers or farther north, according to census data.
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Other memorable Johnson County stories from this day
2014
A Franklin gas station that was shut down twice after a drug raid was allowed to reopen, with police and prosecutors monitoring it.
2002
An 18-year-old Greenwood Community High School student was jailed on charges that he set fire to Bed, Bath & Beyond, where he worked
1994
Record cold temperatures were chilling Johnson County. The temperature reached 17 degrees below zero at Indianapolis International Airport earlier that morning.
