Traffic debacle underlines flaws in Capital Region transportation

Two of the Baton Rouge area’s biggest transportation flaws were exposed again today: There’s only one major traffic artery, and it happens to be the interstate. “We have a lack of redundancy in the system,” says Ken Perret, a transportation civil engineer who is president of the Louisiana Good Roads and Transportation Association and a former federal and state transportation official. “We don’t have good alternate routes.” Perret says the city-parish has made progress through the Green Light Plan, but the region still has a long way to go “to develop parallel arteries to take the pressure off the interstate.” At the state level, a steady funding stream would help in developing a long-range transportation plan, he says, noting that the gasoline tax has been frozen since the 1980s. “I don’t think there is a short-term solution,” says Rachel DiResto, executive vice president of the Center for Planning Excellence. The long-term solution, she says, is a better-connected street grid, as proposed by FuturEBR, that provides local travelers more options. —David Jacobs