"It's very much based on rubric that is created by the bicycle and pedestrian safety commission," a city planner told Indiana Public Media, explaining how Bloomington decides which residential street gets speed humps and which one waits another year. No neighborhood wins this by circulating more petition signatures than the next one. Every application gets scored against the same criteria, and the highest score wins the year's project.

This year, the winner was E Rogers Road, the street that carries The Stands in and out of the rest of Bloomington.

On Aug. 14, 2026, the City of Bloomington announced E Rogers Road as the highest-priority corridor in the 2026 cycle of its Resident-Led Traffic Calming Program, based on vehicle speed, the number of people walking and biking along it, general walkability, and its history of speed-related crashes. That's a more specific kind of news than "the city is looking at safety improvements." A scoring system ranked every application this cycle, and your street's road came out on top.

What "Selected" Actually Triggers

Getting picked doesn't mean a crew shows up with asphalt next week. It means Rogers Road enters a defined process the city has now run six years running. Staff draft a preliminary design, bring it to the people who live along the corridor, collect feedback, then send a final concept to the Transportation Commission for an up-or-down vote.

For Rogers Road, that process is already in motion. A public meeting to review the draft design was held Thursday, Sept. 10, from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. at Sherwood Oaks Church, 2700 E. Rogers Road. Residents who couldn't attend in person had the option to join by Zoom or watch on CATS local cable. An online survey opened the same day on the city's Traffic Calming webpage, giving anyone who missed the meeting a second way to weigh in before the design locks.

That Sept. 26 vote is the one that matters most. It's the moment a draft concept either becomes a funded project or gets sent back for revision.

The City Has Been Watching This Stretch Before

This isn't the first time engineers have flagged this piece of road near The Stands. Back in 2018, the city scoped a separate project entirely, an accessible multiuse path along the north side of Rogers Road running from High Street to The Stands Drive and Winding Brook Circle, along with a safer pedestrian crossing of Rogers Road right at the neighborhood entrance. That project held its own public meeting that July to gather input on the crossing design. Whether that particular sidepath ever reached construction is a separate question. What's clear is that this stretch of Rogers Road has been on the city's radar for the better part of a decade, first as a place to get people walking and biking somewhere useful, now as a place to get the cars already using it to slow down.

What a Resident-Led Project Actually Installs

The Traffic Calming and Greenways Program doesn't widen roads or add lanes. Its toolkit is narrow and specific: speed cushions and speed humps, paired with supporting details like curb bump-outs, pavement markings, and signage.

Two recent examples from the same program show the scale involved:

• A previous cycle's project on E. Maxwell Lane, between Henderson Street and Woodlawn Avenue, installed speed humps, pavement markings, and signs.
• A project on West 11th Street, between Monroe Street and Maple Street, selected in the 2025 cycle, finished construction in May 2026.

Neither turned a residential street into a boulevard. Both made an existing street measurably slower to drive, which is the entire point of the program. Whatever concept the Transportation Commission approves for Rogers Road on Sept. 26 will draw from that same short list of tools.

History also suggests a gap between approval and actual construction. The city's Neighborhood Greenway project on E. Thornton and Arden drives held its first public meeting in March 2024, and construction didn't start until May 2025, roughly 14 months later. That project involved more design work than a straightforward speed hump installation, so it's not a perfect match for Rogers Road, but it's a reasonable signal that a Sept. 26 approval likely marks the start of a longer runway rather than the finish line.

Why This Matters If You Live Off Rogers Road

If you're in The Stands, Rogers Road isn't a street you pass through occasionally. It's the street you use every time you leave. A traffic calming project changes how that drive feels day to day, not how the neighborhood reads on a map.

The practical version: once construction happens, expect Rogers Road to carry more physical cues asking drivers to slow down, most likely humps or cushions rather than anything that reduces the number of lanes. Expect the specifics, exact placement, device type, and whether the intersection at The Stands Drive gets particular attention, to be locked in only after the Sept. 26 vote, not before. And if you want input on where those devices land, the design isn't finalized yet. The city's Aug. 14 announcement points to the same webpage where the survey opened Sept. 10, and the Sept. 26 Transportation Commission meeting is open to public comment before the vote is taken.

None of this is dramatic. It's the kind of quiet infrastructure change that never shows up in a listing description but does show up in how a resident actually experiences the one road that connects the neighborhood to everything else. Worth watching. Not worth losing sleep over.

Rogers Road isn't the only piece of East Side infrastructure worth tracking if you're in or near The Stands, and staying ahead of changes like this is part of what it means to actually know a neighborhood instead of just describing it. If you have questions about how a project like this fits into the bigger picture for The Stands, or you're thinking through a move within Bloomington's East Side, Alex Root is a call away. Let's Connect.