Proposed I-410

[Antrell Williams]

Nice post SBCmetroguy.

Our inadequate freeway system plays a major role of our traffic problems in Baton Rouge but another huge factor is the lack of a complete street grid in south Baton Rouge and the dependency on I-10. New Orleans metro area freeway system, Lake Charles, Alexandria, and Shreveport have adequate freeway infrastructure, its about time the capital city does too. Scrap I-410, adopt I-51 and a southwestern bypass (possibly a tollway) with a new bridge across the Mississippi. In the future I believe many New Orleanians will use I-49 to bypass Baton Rouge when heading west.

[steve3n8]

Environmental permitting for B.R. loop gets under way

The first phase of the environmental permitting process for a controversial and long-debated highway traffic loop around Baton Rouge was approved Tuesday by the Baton Rouge Urbanized Area Metropolitan Planning Organization. Mike Bruce, a principal at Stantec, a lead engineering firm on the loop, says the $629,000 permitting phase for the loop is part of an earmark that the U.S. Congress approved about four years ago but is just now being put to use. It is a necessary step if the loop is ever to get an environmental permit from the Federal Highway Administration, which is required for federal funding on any future construction phase on the project. Bruce says once the roughly 85-mile loop's route has been determined, future environmental studies will detail the artifacts and endangered species in the area. Those studies could cost "several million dollars," he says. Despite public perception that the loop has been killed by opposition in cities such as Central as well as other parishes in the Capital Region, Bruce says polling shows the $4.5 billion project is still considered viable. "The fact is, we've just been going through the normal process," Bruce says of the recent funding approval. —Adam Pearson

Businessreport.com

[cajun]

Gosh I thought it was dead. Maybe we'll see parts of it after all.

The fact that Livingston created a toll authority for a bridge to AP seems to be indicative of their possible openness to support parts of a loop.

[richyb83]

It would be nice or them to start on the Livingston/Ascension Parkway while they are trying to figure out this loop spending even more money on studies...

 

A western Ascension/WBR Bypass upgrading Hwy 30 with new bridge in Addis/Brusly; tying into a La 415(new bridge over Intracoastal Waterway) should really help I-10 traffic in BR

[cajun]

I have a hard time seeing relief in the future with widening 10 between College and downtown being completely off the table.

I can't help but think that this could stunt downtown's growth by limiting access.

There are no other arteries into downtown that I can think of with room to grow without expropriating significant real estate. It also isn't exactly easy to cross the river at $500 million or more being the minimum to build a bridge or tunnel- either of which are more likely in Addis or Brusly than in the downtown area.

I'd honestly rather see them widen Airline to 8 lanes and eliminate some of the traffic lights on that route while improving the old bridge.....but I've always assumed that we'd eventually bite the bullet and widen I-10 between downtown and College. I've even read a study that indicated that it could be completed without removing businesses in the overpass area.

The West Bank expressway is probably a good option- especially if Brusly is successful at routing the rail road tracks around the city.

Other projects like widening Hooper and crossing the river into Livingston and widening Florida Blvd east of Airline are going to be needed.

[buckett5425]

I have a hard time seeing relief in the future with widening 10 between College and downtown being completely off the table.

I can't help but think that this could stunt downtown's growth by limiting access.

There are no other arteries into downtown that I can think of with room to grow without expropriating significant real estate. It also isn't exactly easy to cross the river at $500 million or more being the minimum to build a bridge or tunnel- either of which are more likely in Addis or Brusly than in the downtown area.

I'd honestly rather see them widen Airline to 8 lanes and eliminate some of the traffic lights on that route while improving the old bridge.....but I've always assumed that we'd eventually bite the bullet and widen I-10 between downtown and College. I've even read a study that indicated that it could be completed without removing businesses in the overpass area.

The West Bank expressway is probably a good option- especially if Brusly is successful at routing the rail road tracks around the city.

Other projects like widening Hooper and crossing the river into Livingston and widening Florida Blvd east of Airline are going to be needed.

 

I would disagree that it could stunt downtowns progress. Interstates were redirected through downtowns to provide suburbanites quick and easy access to the urban centers. However, instead what happened was that it made it more convenient for people to live further out in the suburbs and downtowns began to decline. The only way to promote downtown development is with mass transit and denser residential development. Widening the interstate will not lead to prosperity in an area of down that already doesnt accommodate vehicles and by that I mean parking. 

 

Also, as someone who has lived downtown now for 5 years, Nicholson, Government, Florida, North Street, North Blvd, Scenic HWY and 110 South are completely underutilized into downtown during rush hour. People ask me all the time if I hate dealing with traffic because I live downtown, my response is, "What traffic, I only hit traffic if I try to drive on Airline, Bluebonnet or Seigen?" The only people widening the interstate accommodates are those people who chose to live along the I 12 Corridor or I10 past Essen and those areas have their own traffic snarls, with one major road accommodating single entrance subdivisions.

[cajun]

Residential development hasn't matched the required density needed to reduce sprawl. There are major barriers to that, not the least of which is the lack of demand and those pesky capitalist property rights.

That's a huge problem with our centralized downtown core model of urban development, IMO. In my ideal city, no builing would be higher than 6 or 7 floors and we'd have dozens of smaller business districts instead of one or two larger ones. I still don't think that can address sprawl just for the simple fact that we want flexibility in occupancy rates and zoning to encourage mobility of citizens and creativity of design. It also takes a significantly less amount of time to move from one place to another than it dose to build a new home. My thesis is that suburban sprawl is impossible to avoid even under the most ideal scenario unless we want to get draconian and micro manage the life of every citizen (I haven't checked the UP forum for Pyongyang, but I imagine it's pretty bleak).

Instead of attacking it or undermining sprawl, we need spend more time managing it while actually solving the urban problems that make the city core unwelcoming and unattractive to those people. One of the many problems is our basic model of development.

Of course, I can plan everything out perfectly, but I'd still have to address the fact that not everyone wants to live in high density housing or work in a massive cube farm with thousands of other people. We are all subject to the free market in one way or another.

You are quick to blame interstates for everything, but the reality is that people expect varying degrees of residential density in their housing options. For a city to grow without suburban development (or the need for huge arteries to support bad planning), older obsolete homes and businesses would have to almost constantly be replaced by newer more dense housing. That doesn't happen for a number of very good reasons (people own those properties already, historic districts, government regulations in the form of zoning restrictions, and many more things that make density gains less feasable than required to match our expectations).

Not every tower that goes up in a downtown area is matched by the high density housing stock in a proportio required to support this urban utopia that you dream of. It's actually very rare in America outside of Manhattan.

Your proposal of shuttling commuters in by rail is just another way of treating the symptoms of a fundamentally flawed system (and is just a variant of the same solution provided by freeways) .....the core of which is caused by employment centers that are way too dense to be supported by the surrounding housing stock without being fed by high capacity public transit or freeways. It's a rat race from the citizen's perspective with either mode of transit.

In a way, towering office buildings and CBD's represent sprawl just as much as the actual suburbs do.

Take a look at New Orleans as a unique example. You see two different models of development depending on what side of Canal you are on. One of them is horribly wrong, and the other is much better. One model depends on freeways or public transit to shuttle people into their inhuman scale buildings from their neighborhoods, the other has matching residential density alongside commercial centers.

It isn't an "American" thing as much as an "industrial revolution" thing. A fundamental flaw (like what I think exists) in our development patters won't be addressed by the residential housing market or by massive investments into public transit but more likely by technological advances that make massive, high density business centers obsolete.

An elaborate public transit network is just another way to treat a symptom of the urban equivalent of terminal cancer. It's foolish to pretend that public transit or freeways are morally or functionally superior to each other. Both involve shuttling citizens around, and since they both promote and subsidize sprawl, an dependency on either are simply varying degrees of bad.

Either way, the future of downtown Baton Rouge absolutely has to involve more hospitality or residential. There isn't enough people living there to address the current supply of office space. That will be harder and harder to address in the future as we become less dependent on a traditional work place and freeways become more congested as the city continues to not address major quality of life issues driving people to the suburbs.

Widening a freeway or building a rail route to another part of the city is like giving a morbidly obese person an electric wheelchair. It solves one problem only to exacerbate another.

It's foolish to think (as some of us do) that a housing problem is the only one that we need to address. If that were the case, public housing projects would have solved this 50 years ago. Housing density and our current development model are only a tiny part of a problem that will never fully be understood until we stop simplifying and trivializing the very real and complex reasons people choose to live in the suburbs. History has proven that if you take away or limit their means of egress into a commercial district by allowing infrastructure to become obsolete or not planning ahead, the area that suffers is the urban core and the region as a whole as basic urban amenities move to the suburbs, legitimizing those communities even more.

I am worried that Buckett and people like him despise those "people who choose to live in single entrance subdivisions".....and while his intentions are good, if he has that kind of attitude, he'll never understand why those despicable average Americans made their choice of living arrangement. That possible lack of perspective undermines any effort to attract those people back into the urban core. It's a way more complicated problem that will take generations to address.

[buckett5425]

Huh?

 

So on one hand, you believe people should be allowed to follow the free market and live where ever they want and get there however they want be it ever expansive interstates. But on the other hand, you criticize that type of development and advocate that all cities look like European cities with no transit and people live right next door to where they work?

 

Well, Cajun, I agree with you, and I think the Railroad Suburb is the solution to that problem and New Orleans is the perfect example. You can criticize the business district, some planners have made the case that the dense american business district was only possible BECAUSE of interstates. But St Charles and Magazine Street are models of development that allow quick access to both semi dense and single family housing options within close proximity to one another and allow efficient forms of transportation when traveling to other parts of the city are required. 

 

 

 

Also, there is another movement out there rejecting the "technoburb" philosophy where we all work at home and use Skype to meet. Studies have proven that when people work in collaborative atmospheres, especially located in downtowns, productivity and the quality of work increases, compared to when you are isolated in your home simply completing a task and meet at the office once a week. However, only time will tell, I know I prefer being in an exciting atmosphere learning from others than being isolated in an office...

[cajun]

In the grand scheme of things, there isn't much of a difference between rail, automotive, or air travel if our urban areas become dependent on them. They contribute to sprawl and have just enough flexibility to move people out of the urban center that we want to revitalize. I am not advocating that we return to horse and buggies, but I see attacking freeways and streets that feed our screwed up development patterns while advocating for widespread rail based transit within our cities is hypocritical. They represent different treatment options for the symptoms of a very sick and screwed up development pattern that exists for very serious and complex reasons that no one wants to address.

We can and do enable sprawl by builing freeways AND rail systems. You can build roads and rail to nowhere all day, but people wouldn't move to the suburbs if the urban centers provided an inviting and desirable place to live for everyone. Means of transport is an enabler.....which is secondary to root cause. A road or subway to the suburbs isn't a reason people leave the city. It merely provides a choice.

Also....I'm afraid that the future will involve less people commuting not because of communication advances, but technological advances that make their manpower unnecessary in the current form. Factories and office that employ thousands make get by with far less people in the future, making all of our roles in society more flexible and wider in scope. Technology has enabled small business and young creative people to build empires from their garage. The need for massive urban centers that came out of the industrial revolution is going to shrink in the future, not expand.

[buckett5425]

In the grand scheme of things, there isn't much of a difference between rail, automotive, or air travel if our urban areas become dependent on them. They contribute to sprawl and have just enough flexibility to move people out of the urban center that we want to revitalize. I am not advocating that we return to horse and buggies, but I see attacking freeways and streets that feed our screwed up development patterns while advocating for widespread rail based transit within our cities is hypocritical. They represent different treatment options for the symptoms of a very sick and screwed up development pattern that exists for very serious and complex reasons that no one wants to address.

We can and do enable sprawl by builing freeways AND rail systems. You can build roads and rail to nowhere all day, but people wouldn't move to the suburbs if the urban centers provided an inviting and desirable place to live for everyone. Means of transport is an enabler.....which is secondary to root cause. A road or subway to the suburbs isn't a reason people leave the city. It merely provides a choice.

Also....I'm afraid that the future will involve less people commuting not because of communication advances, but technological advances that make their manpower unnecessary in the current form. Factories and office that employ thousands make get by with far less people in the future, making all of our roles in society more flexible and wider in scope. Technology has enabled small business and young creative people to build empires from their garage. The need for massive urban centers that came out of the industrial revolution is going to shrink in the future, not expand.

 

 

I am not sure lumping air travel, freeways, and railroads into the same category, simply because they create sprawl, is a wise decision.  While that may be true, Freeways or Railroad based communities create different types of cities, with varying qualities of life. Now, you know where I am going with this point, so I will save us the trouble, but just keep that in mind.

 

Also, when discussing root causes and what not for why we enable transport to or from urban centers, what is your argument when examining a city like Paris? All of the buildings are built at a human scale, the wealthiest live in the city center, and the city still utilizes mass transit. You could make the comparison to Italian cities, where homes create a wall at the street, but once you entire the home there are lavish vegetated courtyards, similar to the french quarter. Is it unwise for Paris to have a subway? 

[cajun]

Let's explore the varying qualities of life statement for a moment.....because it's absurd to find correlation where it doesn't exist, and then confuse it with causation as I'm afraid you are doing.

Quality of life matters to the individual and accurate QOL measures will vary between individuals. The differences in culture, schools, and job opportunities between communities has much more to do with the people who live there than the existance of a rail depot or the number of freeway interchanges. Some people love one community, but hate another. Some enjoy rural living, while others don't. We shouldn't assume a single family home in the suburbs is for everyone. It isn't.

Rail based transit as used in the US may promote more pedestrian oriented lifestyle (although I'll argue that the lifestyle existed before the transit in most cases), but it still promotes sprawl just as freeway use does.....and used as an arteries to support dense development where adequate residential infrastructure doesn't exist. It is a way to bypass a serious problem....which is that the urban area has lost it's appeal for a large group of people.

Lots of politicians like to throw blame on suburbanites for everyone wrong with their city. Instead of using words that elicit an emotional appeal (the ___ism words), I suggest that those politicians drop the BS and start trying to figure out how to attract residents from the suburbs. Some have had moderate success in this area without any major public transit expansions.

Railways and highways open up a choice, but they are not the reason people left.

From the citizen's perspective, a 40 minute commute on a train takes the same amount of time as a 40 minute commute by car. The distance is both vastly farther than can be achieved by 40 minutes of walking.

I am not as familiar with Paris beyond their touristy parts. It is not without it's imperfections. I never said the European model is perfect....but it is superior to our own in most cases because of the timeframe it was initially developed (and not why you think).

IMO, a perfectly efficient town would have rail and automotive transit, but neither would be required for daily commutes.

Arguing weather a suburb linked by rail is better than one linked by highway will end with both parties being wrong. They are both different ways to move a boat load of people efficiently to their homes and back.

American development patters before WW2 and after are different from each other because of the existance of automobiles and a long list of urban problems. Parts of European cities were often setup even before the industrial revolution....and not only lack dependency on one particular mode of transit, but have vastly less rush hour problems and density variances as even the best functioning American cities. The technological revolution we are in now knows no bounds. I will effect every corner of this globe and will hopefully present more uniform needs from an urban perspective.

That brings me back to my initial point. Our model is completely flawed and is exacerbated by inept urban leaders who have no perspective of suburban needs beyond blaming those that left for everything Having those suburban people commute to a city center by car or rail really doesn't make a difference in the grand scheme of things until the problems are addressed and our economy completed its transition.

No one is entirely certain of what the future holds. I predict more stable oil prices, more streamlined production, and continued empowerment of small business via technology. I am certain that presenting consumers with a choice between suburban and urban living shouldn't be as easy of decision as it currently seems to be for so many people.

The existance of a freeway loop is only going to be a problem for the urban core of Baton Rouge if they are not prepared to compete with the good schools, safe neighborhoods, reasonable taxes, and abundant housing options of the suburbs. Today, there are far too much commercial space downtown for the amount of residential development in the immediate area. More housing is needed to support it, and it doesn't seem to be happening downtown at an acceptable rate to produce a long term sustainable neighborhood. The short term solution is more links to good neighborhoods with a growing, productive, residential population.

[buckett5425]

Cajun,

 

You spend the entire post criticizing sprawl, dreaming of a city where everyone can walk to work, only to justify it and promote it with the idea that building more roads is the easiest solution to solving our cities problems. One only needs to look to Houston or Atlanta to know that isn't the best solution. 

 

I still stand by my opinion that cities that grew before the post war boom stand the best chance of providing the varying commercial and residential options at many different levels of density to best meet the needs of their residents with many different forms of transit, be it personal automobile or walking.

 

 

So, I think we are done here. 

[Antrell Williams]

I love the debate, although lets keep it on track with the proposed I-410.

 

 

Now about I-410, I think a 85-mile loop is ridiculous. However, we do need a southern bypass with another bridge across the river.

[cajun]

 

 

You spend the entire post criticizing sprawl, dreaming of a city where everyone can walk to work, only to justify it and promote it with the idea that building more roads is the easiest solution to solving our cities problems. 

 

 

My point is way up here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You are down here.  

 

If you look up you might spot it flying way over your head.    Or you can actually read my posts.  I'm all up for a healthy debate if you want to point out where I wasn't clear.

[buckett5425]

My point is way up here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You are down here.  

 

If you look up you might spot it flying way over your head.    Or you can actually read my posts.  I'm all up for a healthy debate if you want to point out where I wasn't clear.

 

 

I must be doing something right for you to stoop to that level.