DOTD wants to close Washington street exit off of I-10 Bridge...

isn't that a racist issue.

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still do not understand why trucks in the left lane getting off the bridge have to immediately feel the need to merge to the middle lane.

98% of these trucks are passing through and they do not really need to move over until the split

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Bruh it's at least 3 times per week one of those frickers will pull in front of me

That exit should have been closed 40 ( forty) years ago.

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DOTD said the closure would help with weaving and congestion issues on the Interstate.

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Ta-da!

All they had to do was this to begin with, but instead we get at least a half decade long overpass widening project.

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Yep. There is no reason that someone can't just take the Nicholson/Highland Exit. It is at most 1500 feet out of their way.

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Or Dalrymple where you could loop back on Washington.

When did washington become Lorri Burgess Ave?

The ones opposing it are doing so because the I-10 bridge split their communities in half back when it was built.
Over 400 houses were destroyed in the neighborhoods around that bridge.
Those older folks are slowly dying off.

https://www.louisianafolklife.org/lt/articles_essays/lfmvalleypark.html

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The African American communities of Baton Rouge were most affected by the interstate, and the impact on predominantly African American communities by the construction of the Interstate highway system dates back to the 1950s and 1960s (Bauman, Biles, and Szylvian 2000: 6). Large sections of homes and businesses were uprooted to make way for this construction, forcing many residents to leave their communities and causing many established communities to pick up the pieces and rebuild their communities around the interstate highways. An example of this is the community of Old South Baton Rouge, which Interstate 10 cut a swath through the community. More than four hundred houses were torn down to make way for the elevated highway (Hendy 2009). The impact of the community division is highlighted in the incidents of late 1964 when African American school children were cut off from their normal routes to school:

A major problem centers around several Negro schools between Louise Street and City Park Lake where the six-lane highway system is on the ground. It cuts off Negro neighborhoods, to varying extents, from Buchanan, McKinley Junior High and McKinley Senior High Schools. As a result, numbers of Negro children on their way to and from the schools cross the expressway everyday as a shortcut to school, creating a traffic hazard that has gotten on motorists' nerves and prompted the police department to issue repeated statements about the dangers of crossing through a six-lane thoroughfare (State Times, December 10, 1964).

Many African American communities saw previous stable communities split in half by the interstate development. The community of Valley Park, located near the southern point of Baton Rouge, represents the many African American communities affected by the construction.

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The Valley Park area was a working class African American community with a high percentage of home ownership. The community bordered the city limits of Baton Rouge at Acadian Avenue, contained the city dump until the early 1970s, and was adjacent to the fledging College Drive and Corporation streets. The immense change the interstate brought to the area was not lost on locals, nor did locals ignore the possibility that the community's identity was the very reason why it was chosen to be altered. Sixty-one-year-old Vernon “Duke” Pritchard, a Valley Park Resident, expressed this sentiment to me in a conversation:

I really don't know. I don't know . . . uh. It's just like that for South Baton Rouge. The whole mapping that they did, it went predominantly through all black neighborhoods. I guess they thought they could move them out and pay a little less than going through the white neighborhoods. Yeah, I feel it's strictly a black and white thing. Anyway, they put that Interstate there and it caused havoc on people having to go all the way out to just go straight down the street. . . . When the Interstate came through, that caused a problem. A lot of people didn't want to move and a lot of people were wondering why the city picked this neighborhood and split it in half.3 (Pritchard, personal communication, October, 29, 2011)

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