BATON ROUGE, LA – State transportation officials announced a new public survey this week aimed at gathering input for the future of the I-12 corridor, marking the latest step in Louisiana’s decades-long effort to carefully study a traffic problem that every resident solved years ago while sitting motionless in it.
The survey is expected to collect thousands of responses from commuters offering a wide range of suggestions, including widening the interstate, improving interchanges, adding alternate routes, and “please do literally anything.”
Officials say the study will help identify transportation needs along the rapidly growing corridor, though early findings have already confirmed that large numbers of vehicles attempting to occupy the same space at the same time tends to slow traffic down.
The master plan will reportedly involve extensive public meetings, consultant reports, traffic models and at least three professionally bound documents concluding that I-12 experiences congestion.
Transportation planners praised the process as an important step toward understanding whether the daily traffic backup stretching from Livingston Parish to Baton Rouge is, in fact, traffic.
Officials estimate the final report will contain approximately 600 pages, 598 of which will conclude that too many people are trying to get to Baton Rouge at the same time.
