The on again-off again attempt to revamp Lafayette’s most malignant roadway, Johnston Street, is rolling again. Mired in various committees for the past five years, the plan now heads to the city’s Planning Commission, and then to the City-Parish Council before the end of summer, reports The Advocate. The sticking point, beyond the sticker shock of anywhere from $6 million to $30 million a mile, depending on the final plan, is running a boulevard down the center of the street.
Urban planners, such as UL’s Tom Sammons, who helped create the initial design, urge the creation of a boulevard because of traffic safety as well as quality of life. Merchants along Johnston Street welcome buried utility lines and underground drainage but oppose the boulevard concept, because they say it would interfere with a driver’s ability to easily pull into their parking lots. “If it’s not convenient, they aren’t stopping,” Brian Fournet, who owns a service station on Johnston Street, told The Advocate.
I thought that a boulevard also added something like a 40% increase in capacity over an undivided highway. That would seem like an important detail considering that Johnston is not only Lafayette's most malignant roadway, but also probably it's most congested.
... written by roadway hooligan , June 25, 2009 - 01:27 am
how'd that song go.....something about la-la-la live for today? Seems that's what the business community harps on constantly. The job of our leaders is to think with a long view and take actions that will benefit the overall community in the long term. Short term thinking....apparently human beings are not the only species to have long term thinking...often it appears we don't.
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David Calhoun and Elizabeth “EB” Brooks are the first two employees of Lafayette Central Park Inc., the nonprofit charged with turning Lafayette Consolidated Government’s 100-acre Johnston Street Horse Farm property into a passive public park. Calhoun was named executive director, and Brooks is director of planning and design.
There will soon be a whole lot of shakin’ going on at Benny’s Sportshack Supplement Depot, a new concept by Opelousas native Benny Nele. Located at 2002 Johnston St., the supplement shop, smoothie bar and café, featuring hot off the press paninis and wraps, plans to open in late May.
This year’s Cool Town issue is all about people who are not native to South Louisiana but made a conscious decision to be here, to be among us, to participate in our culture and contribute to it.
A shelved ordinance transferring $200,000 from a northside drainage project to a south Lafayette development may not break any laws, but it stinks to high heaven.
An effort to restore a shuttered dancehall and document other vacant or razed honky-tonks could serve as a model for saving an endangered species of entertainment.
Lafayette’s gene pool has been host to a long line of eccentric characters who have blurred the lines between crazy, genius, disturbed and curiously entertaining.
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