Momentum keeps building for two long-term projects for a commuter rail and a streetcar line that could be a huge boon for Baton Rouge and the super region.
At a meeting Thursday morning of the FutureBR Implementation Team, Baton Rouge Area Foundation’s John Spain announced they were nearing completion on a feasibility study of a commuter rail line linking Baton Rouge and New Orleans.
As discussed during a panel at the Smart Growth Summit last November, both cities were still very much interested in the project going forward, despite a lack of interest on the state level.
Adding to the increased vitality of the project was the announcement in December that the Redevelopment Authority would purchase the old Entergy building on Government Street near the railroad tracks and turn it into a mixed-use development that could include a passenger terminal.
Some hurdles to deal with for the railway project include the fact that two railway companies own portions of the planned route and would have to sign off on it. Also, there’s the raised portion of the railroad that crosses the Bonnet Carre Spillway, where the speed limit for trains is 10 miles per hour on an aging stretch that’s about 11 miles long. That would mean about $62 million in improvements to get that section up to or at least near the 79 miles per hour operating speed officials expect for the potential passenger rail, according to John Basilica Jr. of HNTB, the planning firm working on the study.
While the railway project is on an incredibly tentative five-year plan, talks of a 7-mile streetcar line linking downtown to LSU seem to be gaining supporters.
At the Implementation Team meeting Thursday, Portland, Ore.-based planner John Fregonese spoke about presenting a plan to the Metro Council for adoption this summer. “These new streetcar lines are being done all around the country and are very important in the redevelopment of certain areas,” he was quoted in the Business Report. “People want to live and have their offices near these streetcar lines.”
So it’s a no-brainer that a streetcar line would be not only an amenity to that corridor, but a necessity to make such a high-density area function properly. And that’s not even including the benefit of a streetcar line shuttling people in and out of campus the way CATS currently does for LSU football games.
The interesting thing to me is that while renderings of the River District plan (including the image at the top of this page) and the Water Institute campus imagine contemporary light rail designs, the city seems more interested in bringing back the streetcars of yesteryear.
We’ve had them before. Our good friend Leif Remř created a cool set of maps of the previous streetcar—and even mule car—lines in Baton Rouge. Check out the maps here, which are tabbed by year.
The folks at Human Transit wrote up a good discussion on the differences between streetcar and light rail, and that’s the kind of discussion I think the city should be having right now. Do we want a streetcar that shares the road on Nicholson or light rail that might have its own designated lane?
While everyone loves the idea of a nostalgic streetcar line, New Orleans and San Francisco have that on lock. If Baton Rouge is trying to be the innovative hub for research and technology, maybe our public transit can reflect that, too.
Image way up at the top of this page taken from the River District master plan renderings.
