Business Report Executive Editor JR Ball has had enough with the incessant whining about Baton Rouge’s traffic disaster.
“Yes, it’s an ever-worsening nightmare,” he writes in his latest column. “Yes, it’s an anchor on our economic growth. Yes, it’s driving me and everyone else insane. And most of all, yes, it’s a soul-crushing scourge that makes life in this otherwise genteel city not worth living. Yet here’s the ugly, inescapable truth: We don’t want to stop the madness.”
Complaining has become our signature move, Ball writes. But when actually doing something about the crumbling roads, dilapidated bridges, the nonexistent street grid, much-discussed loop and the lesser-discussed BUMP means ‘breaking open the piggy bank and paying for it,” we’ve yet to make the leap.
“Go ahead, blame the politicians. Curse the bureaucrats. Cry out in agony pondering the prospect of yet another traffic study,” he says. “Excoriate anyone you want, but then look in the mirror, people—there’s your problem. We’re masochists. We’re 50 shades of road-rage red.”
Ball adds that we are also the ones ultimately responsible for the afternoon hells that are Perkins Road, College and Lee drives, Bluebonnet Boulevard, Siegen Lane, Essen and the scores of other disjointed surface streets.
So stand up, he says, if you cursed the name of state Rep. Steve Carter for proposing to hike the state gas tax by 17 cents per gallon to generate $510 million per year to address Baton Rouge’s pressing road problems as well as the state’s $12 billion project backlog.
Stand up, he commands, if you cheered when Carter proposed a 10-cent gas tax hike, instead, in a last ditch effort to get enough House support.
“Finally, stand up if you went to the polls in December and cast a vote against Green Light II, the defeated 5-mill parishwide property tax proposal that was to fund a series of road improvement projects, like the widening of Lee Drive,” he writes. “If standing, consider yourself part of the problem.”
Read the full column. Send your comments to editors@businessreport.com.
