Downtown Baton Rouge Traffic Signals

Client: City of Baton Rouge

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Downtown Baton Rouge was pretty much of a ghost town when ABMB was hired to build a traffic model for the city in the late 1990s. People thought the city was crazy: why model traffic when there wasn’t any.

“People said you could shoot a cannon down a street without hitting anyone,” recalls Mike Bruce, ABMB’s resident traffic specialist. “It wasn’t that bad, but it was pretty quiet.”  But the city had made it a priority to revitalize the downtown area, and city planners didn’t want congestion to undermine their efforts to make downtown a place where people wanted to go.

Bruce sent teams of ABMB engineers to count traffic at 200 intersections, including morning and evening peaks. They contacted every major business and state agency that was planning to relocate in the area, so they could estimate the number of people in each office and the number of trips from each location. And they took all this data and more and incorporated it into a comprehensive downtown traffic model.

Once ABMB had the model up and running, a few things became very clear. Perhaps the most important was that the signal system—parts of which had been in place since the 1950s—was in dire need of replacing. ABMB made that recommendation. The firm also recommended a number of one-way to two-way conversions and traffic diversion from River Road.

Just around the time ABMB finished the study, downtown Baton Rouge saw signs of renewed life, as new buildings started going up and old ones were rehabbed. In recent months, downtown has recently seen the addition of the new Main Street Market, where small restaurateurs, shopkeepers, artisans, and farmers can sell their wares and the Irene W. Pennington Planetarium opened in spring 2003 to major crowds. Thanks to ABMB, people in the area can take advantage of these amenities without getting tied up in traffic.

In essence, ABMB gave the city a roadmap for a revitalized downtown. Signals have gradually been replaced, streets rerouted, and the traffic flow managed. As new projects are planned, ABMB adds to the model to determine potential impacts and remedies.

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