re: Government Street 'road diet' results: more business, less traffic

all they had to do was lower the speed limit and enforce it, just wait till interstate construction or a bad hurricane, its gonna be a nightmare

In the morning paper, they say the supporters of the Government Street plan want to use the same concepts on Essen, Perkins, Plank, Nicholson and Florida.

Good luck with that.

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use the same concepts on Essen, Perkins,

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That just doesn't make sense. The people who live in the neighborhood behind the strip club on Bennington (whatever its called now) will not like that.

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It takes so long to get places in BR because BR is tiny and the roadways were set a long time ago when there weren't quite as many people around

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BR is actually NOT tiny. BR is shockingly HUGE in land area, it’s just not densely populated. I think people really fail to understand just how much physically larger distances are in Baton Rouge compared with a walkable urban city like New Orleans.

One of the most popular areas of Magazine St for example, between Jefferson and State Street is home to Whole Foods, Saba, Reginelli’s, District Donuts, and literally dozens of other businesses. That stretch is less than half a mile long.

If you were to take that stretch and place it over Government Street in Baton Rouge, it would only stretch from the post office to Foster Dr. The distances between amenities, even in Baton Rouge’s densest neighborhoods are still sparser than most suburban neighborhoods in East Jefferson Parish.

In addition, as said previously, Government is one of the very few east/west surface streets in the city that connects to downtown. There are 7 total streets leaving downtown heading east/west that make it to 22nd street, and just two that continue past foster.

In New Orleans, of the 10 east/west streets leaving the CBD, while they nearly all change names along the way, 7 of them make it all the way to Audubon Park and Loyola/Tulane. Those that don’t have an easy grid of additional east/west streets that provide orders of magnitude more options to take.

The reality is that without significant redesign to Baton Rouge’s street grid (which would require demolishing significantly large numbers of buildings, Baton Rouge cannot be retrofitted to create a dense, walkable, urban landscape outside of downtown. Street grids are too big (if there exists a grid at all), buildings are too far apart, the weather is too miserable most of the year, and there’s simply not enough people who desire that lifestyle to fill in developments who push for this, especially since they tend to be limited in scope, isolated geographically from other walkable areas (meaning you need a car to get to/from there), BR’s mass transit is atrocious even when compared to similarly sprawling cities, the desperate state of the commercial and retail real-estate market post-covid, the lack of white collar jobs in Baton Rouge, the crime, the schools, and the list goes on and on and on.

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want to use the same concepts on Essen, Perkins, Plank

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?????? Walking on Essen or Perkins?

... yes i'm sure this will boost business development on Plank Road.