Traffic is something that every driver in Baton Rouge has likely complained about at one time or another. Laurence Lambert is actually taking steps to solve the problems.
“Traffic is a problem that faces everybody,” he says. “Everyone is impacted by it.”
Lambert is one of five division managers with ABMB Engineers, a local transportation consulting firm. What put him on the map professionally was work he began in 2000 on hurricane evacuation research, when he was working on a master’s in civil engineering at LSU. “We were focusing on contraflow, so we put all these traffic counters on the roads during LSU football games,” he says.
Lambert used that research as the basis for a grant application to the U.S. Department of Transportation to study how to evacuate areas in the wake of terrorist attacks. He spent a year working at the U.S. Department of Transportation on an Eisenhower Fellowship.
His research came in handy during evacuations in advance of Hurricane Ivan in 2004 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005. “If you had a car, you were actually able to get out of New Orleans in a couple of hours for Hurricane Katrina,” he says. “It’s just the very low-mobility people, who didn’t have access to cars, that needed to be addressed during Katrina.”
Lambert now is working on another project that will impact thousands of people: synchronizing the downtown traffic signals. The $12.7 million improvement is scheduled to be completed by September 2009. Once the work is finished, downtown will be full of “smart” traffic signals that detect when vehicles are waiting for a green light. “We’re looking to promote a kind of progression,” he says.
That project has a lot of challenges—coordinating with the various businesses and government agencies, dealing with all of the ongoing construction and working with old equipment. But Lambert says he likes those obstacles. “It’s never the same in terms of projects,” he says. “There’s a uniqueness from one to the next.”
Age: 36
What is the one thing Baton Rouge can do to help attract and retain highly educated young people?
“Reinvesting in LSU certainly helps by having a great place to go to school. And this is a great place to raise a family. There’s a gap in between the two, and reinvesting in downtown is a way to bridge that.”
Click here for the complete list of 2008's Forty Under 40 winners.
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