BATON ROUGE, La. – Can you imagine parts of I-10 shut down to just one lane for a full year? We learned Wednesday that’s the plan for a huge upcoming construction project.
The slow, bumper-to-bumper, stop-and-go traffic on I-10 is anything but pleasant. Relief from that could be coming but will likely mean things will get a lot worse before they get better. Next year the state will start a widening project in both directions from Acadian to the ten, one-ten split near Government Street.
“It’s gonna be a nightmare I mean it’s horrible,” said Sen. Barrow Peacock (R) from Shreveport.
DOTD says it’s nearing the end of its planning phase .
“It’s just like the pre work, you know, when you’re building a house. You have to do all the underground pipes and all of that kind of pre-building type of stuff. And that’s what we’re doing right now,” Rodney Mallet with DOTD said.
When construction actually starts in 2023, DOTD says it plans to cut down traffic to just one lane in each direction through that area from Acadian to Government. That could last a full year and that is raising concerns from the committee.
“I am very concerned when we’re talking about having 1 lane East and 1 lane West…that is very concerning to me,” says Sen. Patrick McMath (R) from Covington.
“It’s gonna be hard times for about a year or so but in the grand scheme of things, we’re gonna benefit for generations. But the questions that we’re getting today are all good questions,” said Mallet.
But perhaps the biggest concern was, now that we’re in hurricane season, what the traffic nightmare could look like if a hurricane decided to come through and folks need to evacuate quickly.
“So many people’s lives are going to be impacted and the hurricane evacuation route is critical,” said Penny Landry who attended the meeting.
“You know, there are plenty of routes to go north. Which with the unpredictability of the hurricanes we see these days it’s probably best to go north anyway,” Mallet responded.
“From a practical standpoint people leave New Orleans and head through Baton Rouge just about every time there’s a storm. So, we have to look at this from a practical standpoint as well,” Sen. McMath reacted.
The next meeting at the capitol about this will likely focus on how this construction might impact hurricane evacuations.
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