Get Smart, Baton Rouge – No, for real—get your act together

No, for real—get your act together.

A panel discussion Wednesday morning at the Louisiana Smart Growth Summit painted a great picture of who knows what they’re doing when it comes to smart growth. And how Baton Rouge also likes what those people are doing.

The panel focused on implementing Complete Streets policies and featured New Orleans City Councilmember Kristin Gisleson Palmer and Baton Rouge Metro Councilmember Ronnie Edwards.

If you aren’t familiar with the Complete Streets concept, let me quickly explain: We don’t live in a city where everyone has a car. And continuing to develop infrastructure solely for the car is an outdated model because less and less of us rely on cars and more and more of us are moving to places that utilize alternative modes of transportation. So we should be updating our streets to add bike lanes, to support public transit, to make crosswalks safer, to actually HAVE crosswalks, etc.

Palmer started it off with a Powerpoint presentation outlining the steps New Orleans took in the last few years to upgrade its Complete Streets policy from a plain old policy (not exactly binding) to a full-on ordinance that must be followed, even including a Complete Streets administrator on the city government payroll.

With about $73 million in state money and FEMA funds that tripled under current Mayor Mitch Landrieu to a whopping $330 million, the city got to work improving the streets. Palmer talked about expanding the streetcar lines and offered before and after photos of roads that were improved with crosswalks and bike lanes—everything from Esplanade Avenue to Decatur Street in the French Quarter.

Yes, New Orleans installed a bike lane on Decatur Street in front of Jackson Square—one of the most traveled and tourist-congested two-lane roads in the city. And no one lost their mind about it.

And while we’re talking about the French Quarter—that compact little tourist mecca that never has an available curbside parking spot—the city recently replaced some of those parking spots with bike racks so as not to obstruct the sidewalk.

Bike racks and pedestrian accessibility over parking spaces? And no one lost their mind about it?!

As Palmer said, the bike parking spots model is “being replicated all over the city” and they’ve done bike counts to show that bike traffic has tripled in those areas where improvements were made.

After Palmer’s thorough presentation, it was Edwards’ turn to show off the recent developments in implementing Baton Rouge’s Complete Streets policy.

I have no notes on this—partially because she didn’t have a Powerpoint presentation (I need visuals!) and also because she didn’t really offer any updates other than that we’re waiting on a study looking at how other cities have implemented their Complete Streets policies.

This is the eighth annual Louisiana Smart Growth Summit. Surely there were plenty of examples of doing it right in the previous seven summits?

In Edwards’ defense, she understands Complete Streets policy. She supports it. But she’s still talking about how fascinating it is that people in European cities rely on trains and ride their bikes. And wouldn’t you know it, they’re healthier, too!

We’re past that conversation.

In a summit that often talked about the super region of Baton Rouge and New Orleans, and the importance of both places working together to grow in smart ways rather than as competitors, it’s clear Baton Rouge is not leading the charge.

We shouldn’t overlook the fact that New Orleans’ situation is completely different and for that, they are farther along in the process. Post-Katrina, it’s become a place for people to try out new ideas. It’s still getting a ton of FEMA money, too. And people like Palmer are already headlong into making those improvements happen.

But maybe it’s time some of that rubs off on Baton Rouge?

Some notes from the rest of the summit:

During the keynote address Monday night by Andrés Duany, the guy who helped create Plan Baton Rouge 15 years ago, he called out the recent controversy over bus benches downtown. The crowd applauded when Duany mentioned how Downtown Development’s Davis Rhorer was steadfast in getting rid of the eyesores in favor of bus benches that actually match the design scheme for downtown. Not to mention those advertising-laden benches look ridiculously uncomfortable for a 75-minute bus wait.

Duany also made some developers uncomfortable when he talked about what’s keeping young people from moving to our city or, at least, staying in our city and starting their own businesses—red tape. He argued that young people are going to places like Detroit to start their businesses because there isn’t a lot of oversight there forcing them to navigate burdensome codes and inspections for extended periods. They don’t have to wait long to get going in Detroit, and so it attracts the cool crowd. “If you don’t make it cool first, then you have to do public-private partnerships,” Duany said—essentially, skipping the steps of small development and jumping ahead to huge, costly, mixed-use developments that exclude the young entrepreneur. That didn’t sit so well with those in attendance who are also involved in the upcoming IBM software center downtown.

A panel discussion Tuesday afternoon looked at the potential for passenger rail in the super region and, again, it was more pie-in-the-sky than about actual work being done. Of course, those involved in developing a high-speed rail plan for the state had to go back to the drawing board when Gov. Bobby Jindal decided in 2009 that we didn’t need it.

As Maj. Gen. John Basilica Jr. said during his presentation, “When the state declined high speed rail money, that took the air out of it a little bit but not as far as the super region was concerned.”

They decided to look at the feasibility of regular passenger rail (with operating speeds around 75 miles per hour) instead and have already started mapping out locations for train stations in downtown Baton Rouge, south Baton Rouge, Gonzales, near the New Orleans International Airport and downtown New Orleans.

Of course, we’re years away from that. But Basilica, at least, had a Powerpoint presentation.