225BatonRouge.com

Ever been so frustrated with traffic you wished someone responsible for the gridlock was in the passenger seat so you could ask him, right then and there, “What were you guys thinking?” Or better yet, “What was being smoked when it all went wrong?”

Me too.

So I invited Ingolf Partenheimer, chief traffic engineer for the Baton Rouge Department of Public Works, to join me for a drive so he could explain it all.

Surprisingly, he agreed.

I set forth a hypothetical errand: I need to leave 225’s downtown offices at 5 p.m. and drive to Target on Siegen Lane to buy something, then double back across the city to my house in Southdowns. In the interest of full disclosure, I wouldn’t normally have the nerve to make this drive at rush hour. I would wait till my wife and I had eaten dinner and probably not leave the house before 8 p.m. But with the chief traffic engineer riding with me, and the audacity of it all produces an unexpected buzz. A tiny part of me is living on the edge.

Partenheimer brings along Jason Taylor. He’s the guy who adjusts the timing on the bright new LED stoplights. The engineers arrive early. Partenheimer says we’d be foolish to take the interstate after 3 p.m., and he strongly suggests we drive Nicholson to Burbank to Siegen. My first thought was to go Government to Acadian, then Perkins to Seigen, but I guess arguing driving routes with a traffic engineer is like trying to convince an internist that a bottle of Strychnine is really Cherry Coke. You can drink it, and you’re sincere, but it kills you. And I don’t want to be killed by traffic today.

The Drive

It’s 4:56 p.m. when we pull away from the City Plaza building. We take North Boulevard to River Road. The yellow streak of sundown is just breaking over the levee, and there is more traffic flowing into downtown than out of it. We hit our first red light at River Road and St. Philip, sit there for a minute, then turn right, passing the Belle of Baton Rouge Casino. Another red light stops us behind The Pastime Lounge, and it’s a minute-and-a-half wait before we’re rumbling under the overpass and onto Nicholson Drive.

Partenheimer checks the time—it’s 5:02. He says up ahead, “They should all be green.” Turns out he knows his signal changes, forecasting them with incredible accuracy. We zip all the way to the turn onto Burbank without stopping. The thing is, LSU is on break. What if it were in session, I ask? “You can add 10 minutes to our drive so far,” the 13-year traffic engineer veteran says quickly.

Burbank is wide open at 5:08, but we get stuck behind someone driving 30 in the left lane. Cars are already backing up in both directions on West Lee. “More congestion,” Taylor says as we pass a huge condo development to the right.

Up ahead a woman in a dark green Camry is signaling to be let in onto Burbank, but there isn’t enough time to break for her. Does it ever help traffic to let people in? “No,” Partenheimer says flatly. “It just slows things down. There are going to be natural gaps in the flow, you just have to take advantage of them.” That’s what I wanted to hear. We keep moving.

At 5:12 we reach the part of Burbank that curves directly into Siegen, and this is where traffic really mounts. Documents pertaining to a comprehensive plan for Baton Rouge dated June 1972 suggest a southerly “circumferential route connecting Highland, Pecue, Stumberg, Flannery, Blackwater, Comite and Thomas” roads should be built to combat auto congestion. The Burbank curve into Siegen is just about the only evidence that this advice was ever heeded, though Partenheimer comments that a loop needs to be elevated to be effective.

We’re at a standstill. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Before our drive I researched different development patterns: Centralized, sporadic linear, multiple radial hubs. But still I couldn’t make sense of Baton Rouge.

“Pattern? There is no pattern,” Partenheimer says staring at the traffic ahead. “There is the vaunted Horizon Plan, but that’s easy enough to circumvent with a simple waver.”

Did landowners and developers simply bully our city into sprawl? “Well, I wouldn’t say bullied,” Partenheimer hedges. “But there wasn’t anyone looking at the greater scope.”

We ease up to 30 mph on the one-lane section of Siegen southeast of Oak Hills subdivision. It’s pretty funny, then, when Partenheimer calls 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. the “golden hour.” Funny, like Congress taking a day off for the Fiesta Bowl is laugh-out-loud hilarious. The novelty of this story is beginning to wear off and I’m growing agitated.

At 5:20 we stop three cars back from the red light at Perkins Road. We’re headed to Target further down Siegen, but Taylor has already predicted the trip back on Perkins will be a “nightmare.” Just then a woman in a white Honda decides to wedge her way in front of us—sans signal—and while still blocking the turn lane to her left, changes her mind, lurches forward, sweeps around nearly clipping the car in front of her, and wheels back into the left turn lane anyway. No signal. That’s a huge pet peeve for me. Partenheimer says his biggest pet peeve has to be drivers who do not know how to merge properly when the interstate drops a lane.

The Siegen stretch between Joe’s Crab Shack and I-10 is pretty bad—nothing but lines of cars like dominoes between Target and us now.

The Problem

As we edge slowly toward the I-10 overpass, it becomes obvious that if Partenheimer could psychoanalyze Baton Rouge, he would surmise that its predominant traffic problem is being too dependent on I-110, I-10 and I-12. It’s a major issue Mayor Kip Holden’s sales tax-fueled $784 million Green Light plan aims to address.

“If the interstate is not working, the other roadways jam up instantly,” the engineer says. Okay, anyone can tell me that, but what other cities are just as dependent on interstates, and what have they done? After a minute of brainstorming, Partenheimer and Taylor agree that Mobile, Ala., is most similarly afflicted. Nashville, Memphis, Shreveport and Lake Charles rely on interstates just as much as Baton Rouge does, but each of those cities built bypassing loops to alleviate the traffic. “I think Dallas has two,” Taylor says with a short laugh.

So, if Baton Rouge is too dependent on interstates, and we don’t have funding for a loop, there must be at least a few cost-effective improvements that can be made, right? If Partenheimer could snap his fingers and change the interstate system, he’d widen it to six lanes from the 10/12 split to Highland Road on I-10, as well as on I-12 from Millerville to the bridge on I-12. And he would most definitely reconfigure the 110/10 merge.

According to DOTD representative Brendan Rush, some widening of both I-10 an I-12 are included in the Louisiana Statewide Transportation Plan, but with zero funding, these improvements are about as likely to happen in the next few years as Stephen Hawking is to win Dancing with the Stars.

We pull into the massive Target parking lot at 5:26—exactly 30 minutes since departure. That’s about what I expected so far, thanks to our string of four or five green lights in a row on Nicholson.

This is when I would spend about 20 minutes inside Target, but we forgo that and head home. It’s dusk on Siegen Lane, and I’m surrounded, bumper-to-bumper, by SUVs and hefty trucks. Drivers are talking into cell phones and scrounging through bags of Whataburger. Some haven’t turned on their headlights yet.

We double back down Siegen and turn right onto Perkins Road. The thing about Perkins now is that, yeah, DOTD is widening it, but all of the utilities, detector loops and stoplight communications had to be dragged out first. This means the smart lights that used to gauge how many cars were coming through and adjust timing to increase overall flow have now been lobotomized and will remain a quasi-traffic trap for another year or more until the street widening is complete.

“If you’re headed this way on Perkins Road in the afternoon, you’re going the wrong way,” Partenheimer says.

We pass the future site of Willow Grove, the up-and-coming traditional neighborhood development on the Kleinpeter property to our right. In short order, more residents and workers will be pouring out onto Perkins from this very spot.

It’s 5:39 when we first glimpse the monolithic frame of Perkins Rowe, shadowed black and towering on the corner of Bluebonnet. What’s this thing going to do to traffic?

“Add 2,500 cars at peak hour,” Partenheimer shoots back. “Bet you didn’t think I knew that. There’s going to be a movie theater, too, so it’ll cause very peaky traffic.”

It’s 5:41 p.m., and Perkins slims down to one lane before reaching Essen. The staggered line of red-orange taillights is dizzying in this dark, narrow corridor. Traffic flow halts three times before we reach Essen.

Ironically, Siegen tied us up long enough to miss most of the rush-hour madness at Perkins and College Drive. Still, things back up once we pass Maxwell’s Market, and it takes seven more minutes to cross College. Partenheimer says it would be great to have a dual left turn lane here, but the city would have to buy the homes near the intersection to do it. It has to be hard to ask someone to move for a turn lane.

As we approach the entrance to Southdowns at Stewart, a yellow taxi speeds toward us in the turn lane. It’s nearly a head-on collision, but we both break in time, and the taxi quickly turns left in front of us, pulling a U-turn across two lanes of traffic. Close call.

We pull up at 5:50 p.m.—54 minutes after leaving 225’s office downtown. Add 10 minutes to that for LSU, plus 20 minutes for Target, and the entire trip—a one-stop, cross-town errand—would take a total of one hour and 24 minutes. That’s more than an hour spent in the car alone.

So are these traffic engineers just gluttons for punishment?

They hear tons of complaints everyday, and take calls from bozos asking for the best way to circumvent traffic and get from A to B. “I do like the challenge,” Partenheimer says with a smile, and Taylor concurs.

The Calming Effect

Of course gridlock is worse since Katrina. DPW’s solution seems to be more of the much-debated traffic calming techniques, such as median widening and speed humps. One such project on Stanford Avenue essentially has put an island in the middle of the road to make the lanes look narrower than they actually are. In theory this will encourage drivers to slow down and make the area near University Lakes safer and more pedestrian-friendly.

There will be much debate and hand ringing over these tactics. The unpopular speed humps in Southdowns are just one example of funds wasted on the wrong kind of traffic calming. The engineers confirm my suspicions: they were the wrong devices to use in an area where speeding never was a big issue.

But Partenheimer says the new traffic calming procedures should be smarter and built upon input from residents. “We want to get quality of life back into the neighborhoods,” he says.

And really, that is the key. We Americans do love our cars—and Baton Rougeans won’t be turning them in for bus or rail passes any time soon—but we don’t love them so much that a life spent constantly starting and stopping behind the wheel feels like time well spent.