John Fregonese, who leads the team that will update East Baton Rouge’s land use plan, says “rubber tire” transit, like bus rapid transit or streetcars, are more realistic for Baton Rouge than sexier but more expensive options like light rail. “You can’t have a competitive, sustainable community without allowing people the choice to move around without a car,” including “human scale” options like walking and biking, he says, speaking at today’s Smart Growth Summit, hosted by the Center for Planning Excellence. Fregonese says it’s important to make decisions “not based on dreamy ideas of what transit could be, but on cold hard facts of what’s going to be supportable and worth the investment. … The core of Baton Rouge has good bones, it does have decent density and it has a lot of employment concentrated in areas you could serve with transit. You could do much, much better, but I wouldn’t jump to light rail.”
Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development Secretary William Ankner says Baton Rouge is preoccupied with parking, which is “death to transit.” Ankner says the state can’t solve transportation issues without dealing with land use, education and housing.
On a different panel at the conference, economist Jim Richardson says population growth is shifting away from East Baton Rouge into Ascension and Livingston parishes. Fregonese says the shift is not inevitable if Baton Rouge moves from a suburban model of development, which depends on cheap vacant land, toward an infill mentality.—David Jacobs
