Editor: Loop wouldn’t have mitigated recent traffic nightmare

The pathetic state of what passes for a surface street grid in Baton Rouge was on full display Aug. 22 when a tanker truck leaking a toxic chemical not only closed Interstate 10 but effectively shut down much of the city, says Business Report Executive Editor JR Ball in his new column. “Absent I-10 to ferry commuters to their jobs, drivers had no choice but to use surface streets that were never designed to handle such volume. Which—as one might expect during a 20-minute commute that, on this day, lasted nearly four blood pressure–soaring hours—led to the invention of many new and colorful four-letter expletives to express the colossal exasperation that can only be experienced during a 60-minute, horn-honking, middle-finger-waving, inch-by-inch, quarter-mile crawl down Bluebonnet Boulevard,” Ball writes. While many motorists who had a similar experience immediately took to their online social networks to vent their frustration and call for support of the “much-hyped, NIMBY-opposed, toll road of a loop,” Ball says an interstate loop around Baton Rouge wouldn’t have made Aug. 22 any more pleasant for anyone caught in traffic. “The underlying cause of the traffic disaster was not the absence of a loop but the absence of any semblance of a surface street grid,” Ball says. Read the full column here. Send your comments to editors@businessreport.com.