Leonard Gray / L’Observateur / February 26, 2000

Highways remain a major concern throughout the River Parishes and, as a reporter, I feel I can speak with some authority about the state of most of the road system in the area. I’ve already written at length about the driverson these roads and their… ahem… driving skills.I won’t, for example, rant on and on about the bonehead who, one recent day, was stopped behind me on River Road at Paul Maillard Road in Luling as I headed toward the Hale Boggs Bridge. He wanted to make a left turn, so heran the red light, drove around me in the face of oncoming traffic and made his turn.

However, it’s the roads themselves which are sadly in need of attention in most areas. The drivers are often a lost cause.Planners have talked for years about linking Interstate 10 with U.S. Highway90 through St. James Parish. They’ve come a long way, with the Gramercyinterchange and the Veterans Memorial Bridge. However, the extension ofthat highway to Louisiana Highway 3127 on the West Bank and eventually tying that to U.S. 90 seems years away.U.S. Highway 90, it is said, will one day become the corridor for the extensionof Interstate 49 from Lafayette to New Orleans. This implies that one dayBoutte can look forward to looking like Marrero. Oh, boy.It is good to see people wanting to cover those horribly deep ditches along Almedia Road but I fear the extension of Earhart Expressway (now ending at Dickory Street in Harahan) all the way to Interstate 310 are just whistling in the wind.

So many smaller state highways are in need of shoulders, especially River Road on both sides of the river. It always seems that an overlay project inone parish gets finished just in time to do another overlay in another parish, so that there’s something going on all the time. Isn’t that what they calledplanned obselescence? Airline Highway’s overlay project in St. Charles Parish is finally seeing an endin sight. Shoulder work on the eastbound lane is wrapping up in the St. Rosearea and striping and median work should take up most of the rest of the contract.

However, the Davis Freshwater Diversion channel and the highway work on River Road and U.S. Highway 90 will soon kick back up, as the roads areshifted back to their original alignments as bridges are completed over the channel.

In LaPlace, it almost seems to be a dream to connect U.S. 51 with BelleTerre Boulevard by way of Woodland Drive, but it seems the present portion of Woodland Drive needs some serious reconstruction first. It’s a roller-coaster ride through some parts as it is.

Highway planners sometimes scare me. They put forth their plans, spendingthousands of dollars, only to discard those plans and spend thousands more on new plans. Sometimes, they need to. Sometimes, someone should havethought out their ideas more before spending the thousands of dollars.

Or is it just me who thinks of these things? That’s a really scary thought.

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