City-parish leaders and state transportation officials are fast-tracking a key road connector project that will extend Dijon Drive from Essen Lane to Bluebonnet Boulevard, creating access to Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center’s planned Children’s Hospital, delineating the northern boundary of the proposed Baton Rouge Health District, and helping to alleviate congestion along Perkins Road and other thoroughfares in the area.
The nearly $23 million project, which will create a boulevard-style, four-lane Dijon Drive Extension, is currently in the preliminary design phase and also under environmental review by the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development.
“We are doing this in a very expedited fashion,” DOTD Project Management Director Jeff Burst says. “We have a very aggressive schedule to get this done. Normally, a project of this magnitude would be a multi-year process.”
Even on an expedited schedule, the project won’t happen overnight. Burst estimates construction could begin in December 2017 with a mid-2019 completion date.
“We only got involved in this about five weeks ago,” he says. “We’re still in the preliminary design phase.”
OLOL is helping to drive the speed at which the project is taking place because of its new Children’s Hospital, which is set to break ground in December 2016 on a 60-acre tract parallel to Interstate 10 and between Essen and Bluebonnet. The hospital, as well as nearby Baton Rouge General Hospital, have together funded the $1 million worth of engineering and design work to get the project started. The two hospitals have also donated much of the vacant land on which the road will be built.
Additional property still needs to be acquired, however. The city-parish is putting up a large chunk of its share of federal highway dollars—$17 million—to acquire that right-of-way and also to help fund construction.
“These are federal dollars that were already coming to the city and Mayor Holden, in his vision for the Health District, wanted to put them towards this project,” says Chief Administrative Office William Daniel. “This road will really connect the hospitals. It will also relieve traffic and it completes another street in the major street plan so it’s a great project.”
DOTD is preparing to do a traffic study to determine the extent to which the extension will help alleviate congestion in the area. A later phase of the project calls for constructing a north-south roadway, called Midway Boulevard, that will link the Dijon Drive Extension to Picardy Avenue. Burst says that phase of the project could begin as soon as the Dijon Drive Extension is completed. Both of the new roadways are included in the long-term plan that Baton Rouge General officials released last week for the Bluebonnet campus.
“This has become one of the top priorities for the City of Baton Rouge and we are on board,” he says. “This is important. The hospital is coming and we need certain infrastructure in place so we are dedicated to assisting them.”
—Stephanie Riegel
