ILLUSTRATION: CATS.JPG
CREDIT: Collin Richie
Cars vs. buses
Perhaps you might want to poll Price LeBlanc, Gerry Lane, All Star Automotive, and many others who enjoy the benefits of selling cars (“The futility of trying to build a bus culture in a car town,” Oct. 13). Those dealers also play a philanthropic role in our community, along with the advertising dollars spent through various forms of media, and bettering the financial position for their employees and our community businesses. CATS?
When I was 5 years old, back in 1958, we had a good bus system and my family had one car. Downtown was the center of the Baton Rouge world, until Bon Marché sprung from the earth. We eventually got two cars and made the trek to the new promise land of shopping. I still like my autonomy provided by my automobile.
It is an understatement to say that traffic is a problem and “what you learn in church on Sunday, you forget in traffic on Monday.” However, the change we might be seeking along the lines of alternative transportation, bicycles, buses, and trollies might be a generation or two removed from our town’s culture. We have to fix the roads and we have to have a serious talk with the traffic lights before we add more stop and start public flow or narrow traffic flow with bicycle lanes.
I am all for transportation alternatives, but it is a cultural mindset that might best be ushered in by younger politicians (Forum 35ers and such) if we are to really change. I think Mid City is a good start, in some ways, but our infrastructure and old oak trees are rooted in an overgrown layout of the city and without drastic redesign and dollars, we are bound to be talking about this problem for a long time. Of course, it makes for good reading.
We as a community have to be willing to change, but change must have a purpose, or destination in this case, for transportation to work better. We will always have the car culture and we will always have those folks needing a way to jobs that are beyond their neighborhoods. Do we continue to commit to shifting the workplace closer to city center, improving neighborhoods, increasing opportunities for safe environments, and finding ways to bring people back to urban vs suburban.
What is the focus goal of our city’s growth? How do we want to define Baton Rouge and its residents as a community through education, community safety, cultural interaction? It is not an easy job to be a planner or politician, but the job does require they “lead the sheep and not eat the sheep.”
Dan Swetman, via email
It is absurd that we have to keep paying for empty buses that just add to the traffic nightmare of Baton Rouge. Why don’t the politicians use the CATS money to either build more and better roads, and finally shut down a useless, wasteful bus system or return the property tax increase to those who pay it?
David Ammons, via email
