Addendum (12-24-2021): After so many years of absence, I have decided to restart this blog in lieu of some major updates in the progress of the I-49 Lafayette Connector freeway project. Future posts will reflect the progress of the Functional Corridor Study and the Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS) processes that are currently ongoing. I have also made some minor edits to this particular blog post to correct some misspellings. Further posts are incoming. — AJK
A new milestone in the development of the I-49 Lafayette Connector project was fulfilled yesterday.
The LADOTD and the Lafayette Connector Partners (LCP) consultant group held an official Public Meeting last Thursday to officially introduce to the public the finalist End-to-End Refinement Alternatives that would be analyzed and vetted through the Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS) process.
Essentially the final Refinement Alternatives will be down to comparisons of two options:
1) The Selected Alternative that was originally approved in the 2003 Final EIS/Record of Decision (ROD); and
2) a Base Refinement Alternative that was created and revised through the Tier II and Tier III Corridor Refinement Processes held during the previous 12 months; itself also broken down with 2 Subalternative designs.
The 2003 ROD Alternative is included only as a control for comparison purposes; the 2017 Refinement Alternative will be ultimately tweaked and revised into the final Supplemental Selected Alternative that will be approved through the SEIS process with a Supplemental ROD.
Here’s a full view of the original 2003 ROD Alternative (all graphics are screencapped from the official LADOTD/LCP Lafayette Connector website).
You can clearly see the main features of the original 2003 ROD alternative:
1) Three-level directional interchange at Kaliste Saloom Road;
2) Conventional slip-ramp diamond interchange at University Avenue/Surrey Street, dependent on displacement of Runway 11-29 at Lafayette Regional Airport as to adjust the runway’s glide path for aircraft approaches/landings/takeoffs;
3) Standalone Single Point Urban Interchanges (SPUI’s) at Johnston Street and a combined Second Street/Third Street couplet, with accompanying underpass grade separations of the BNSF/UP railroad mainline, for direct access downtown;
4) Incorporation of the existing Evangeline Thruway one-way couplet into the freeway frontage road system;
5) A slip-ramp Urban Diamond interchange at Willow Street, with “crossunder” connections under the elevated structure at Castille Avenue/Martin Luther King Drive and Donlon Avenue/Walmart Drive;
6) A higher than conventional vertical clearance (22 feet) along the downtown core area along the Sterling Grove neighborhood (which is a designated Historical District) in order to mitigate the visual impact on the district and surrounding neighborhood; and
7) A brief “dip” of fill section between Johnston and Jefferson streets to accommodate the downtown interchanges.
Due to the strong feedback by local officials who wanted major changes in the design, as well as providing for the changes in the environment and the general area since the 2003 ROD was issued; the Concept Refinement Process was initialized in January 2015 for the purpose of proposing changes and modifications to the design. The resulting three tiered process ended up producing first 19 alternative concepts and 6 series concepts for the central downtown core section, and 25 Potential Design Modifications throughout the corridor (Tier 1); which was reduced down to 4 proposed alignments using 2 series (Elevated and Partially Depressed, the latter split into Open Trench and Cut-and-Cover Tunnel suboptions). Further analysis during Tier II eliminated the Series 6 Partially Depressed option (much to the chagrin of many locals); and reduced the concepts down to two finalists:
Elevated with the existing Evangeline Thruway remaining in couplet form;
and
Elevated with the Thruway converted into a Grand Boulevard on its southbound ROW and the northbound ROW reverted into a local street.
Further analysis was undertaken involving local arterial street access and connectivity underneath the mainline Connector facility, revisions to avoid encroaching upon the LFT Runway 11-29 glide flight path made necessary by the revoking of the proposed displacement, and means to avoid further impacts to the Freetown-Port Rico neighborhood, which itself became a Historical District in 2015.
These new refinement alternatives and subalternatives reflect the consensus of the stakeholders and community in balancing the need for the Connector to handle the traffic logjam on the current Evangeline Thruway with the desire to maintain and improve connectivity and improve asthetics; and also upgrade multimodal access to include pedestrians and bicyclists.
The Base Refinement Alternative is shown below in full:
The hatched blue segment at the southern end of the project reflects improvements that will be incorporated into the related US 90 interchange with Verot School Road; which will be designed and constructed separately from the Connector.
The primary features of the Base Refined Alternative are defined below.
1) The interchange with Kaliste Saloom Road is reduced in scope and design to a 2-level elevated Diverging T, where the cross movements meet at grade rather than are grade separated. This allows for a less expensive and visually less intrusive design, and also allows for adjusting the local connection roads between Kaliste Saloom Rd. and Hugh Walls Rd. to avoid encroaching a recently built motel and the Walls Estate property.
2) The University Avenue/Surrey Street interchange is moderately redesigned by depressing University/Surrey below its existing level by a maximum of 15 feet, adjusting the level of the frontage road system to connect with the lowered University/Surrey ROW, and reducing the vertical profile of the Connector mainline overpass of University/Surrey so that the current glide path for Runway 11-29 at LFT is not encroached. Pumping would be required during rainfall events at the University/Surrey underpass due to the proximity of the Vermilion River crossings of University and the Connector/Evangeline Thruway mainline/frontage system, and retaining walls will probably be necessary to accommodate businesses currently along the existing intersection.
3.) The most significant change from the Tier II proposals is that the proposed connection ramps linking the Evangeline Thruway to the Connector are shifted completely out of the central core area. The north connection ramps I’ll get to shortly; but the south connection ramps, which formerly were placed to connect to the Thruway at Eleventh Street, have now been pushed well to the south to south of Pinhook Road. In addition, the ramps which would have been the north connection to University/Surrey have been shifted north to north of Pinhook Road, connecting with the Evangeline Thruway couplet system south of Taft Street.
The result: Pinhook Road now gets a full interchange with I-49.
Furthermore, the Pinhook Road intersection with the Thruway/Connector is improved by adding a displaced left turn segment from westbound Pinhook to southbound Evangeline Thruway, similar to what you would find in a continuous flow intersection. Adjustments and refinements are made to the local street system to accommodate these revisions; they have been tweaked a bit from the original proposals brought out in the September CSS meetings for improved local access.
4) The shifting of the downtown connection ramps out of the central core segment of the Connector greatly simplifies the design of the mainline; it simply “floats” on elevated structure through the corridor. The “tangent” section that straightens the ROW between Johnston Street and Jefferson Street away from the originally proposed sweeping curve is officially incorporated in the Base Refinement Alternative; as well as the realignment of the northbound Evangeline Thruway from Jefferson to Bellot Drive in order to shift it further away from the St. Genevieve Catholic Church and the Sterling Grove Historical District. The removal of the north connection ramps, originally proposed to connect to the Thruway north of Second Street, means that Simcoe Street and Mudd Avenue are no longer severed and can run continuous under the Connector ROW. Indeed, the current proposal basically keeps the status quo of the downtown street grid intact, save for the adjustments to the northbound Thruway.
5) The Base Refinement Alternative includes the conversion of the Evangeline Thruway between Taft and Simcoe Streets into an urbanized Grand Boulevard centered on the southbound Thruway ROW. The current northbound Thruway in that section, and in the section orphaned through the realignment adjacent to Sterling Grove (Jefferson to Bellot), would revert to a local two-way street within the neighborhood street grid. As an alternative option, Subalternative E-1 is offered which would avoid the Grand Boulevard design and simply retain and improve the existing Thruway couplet, save for the northbound Thruway realignment from Jefferson to Bellot.
In addition, due to the desire from locals (particularly the Evangeline Thruway Redevelopment Team, through their Evangeline Corridor Initiative) to relieve the impact of the Connector structure and enhance connectivity and multimodal opportunities, another subalternative design was added for consideration. SubAlternative M-1 would raise the height of the Connector mainline structures to allow for an additional bump-up in vertical clearance in the downtown core area. The base condition would be 22 feet (as mandated in the 2003 ROD as part of the mitigation plan for the Sterling Grove Historical District); M-1 would raise that level up to 30 feet throughout the downtown area.
6) The segment north of downtown between the Louisiana & Delta Railroad Breaux Bridge Spur and I-10 also underwent some major changes between Tier II and Tier III. In particular, LCP had to resolve a beef from the ECI over the latter’s proposal for a North Gateway design keyed on a large circle interchange for Willow Street. The consultants ultimately rejected that design due to insufficent and incompatible traffic flow, and went with the conventional slip-ramp urban diamond design from the original 2003 ROD. However, they did make some modest concessions to the ECI regarding the two local “crossunder” connections bracketing the Willow Street interchange; and they also found an unique way of providing the north connection ramps to the central Downtown segment. The graphic below shows the results.
The design revisions that stand out are: the two “dogbone roundabouts” that are now added to negotiate access at the Donlon Avenue/Walmart Drive and Castille Avenue/Dr. Martin Luther King Drive crossover intersections with the Thruway; and the newly relocated connection ramps to the Thruway that are now braided with the south ramps to the Willow Street interchange. In order to fit the Donlon and Northside Walmart access roads to meet the new “bone ’bout,” new local connectors are built, and the existing 3/4 intersection with Donlon/WMT are modded into RIRO (right-in/right-out) intersections. In addition, portions of the existing two-way service road fronting the Thruway are eliminated south of Chappius Drive, which is now channeled along the remaining portion to Willow Street.
The north roundabout connecting MLK Drive and Castille with the service roads flanking the Thruway also got some modest tweaking in order to save some ROW space and better serve local access. The biggest change is the addition of a new local street that would run parallel to the Thruway between MLK and Willow that would link to a new tie-in to a truncated frontage road. This would simplify greatly the design of the Castille/MLK roundabout, since it serves as the transition between the beginning of the one-way frontage road network and the existing two-way service roads. (The crossover at Chalmette Drive that was originally scheduled to be the transition is now eliminated, giving more space for the elevated section of the Connector mainline to drop back to grade level for the I-10 interchange.)
It was all of these refinements that were introduced by the LCP and LADOTD teams: first to the Community Work Group on Wednesday, and then to the Technical Advisory Committee Thursday morning and the general public via the Public Meeting/Moderated Session Thursday night.
Public and stakeholder comment (both oral and written) was solicited at the Open House Public Meeting; feedback will be taken and recorded for official posterity up until November 1st. Then, if warranted, revisions to the E2E alternatives will be developed and presented to the CSS committees (CWG and TAC), and presented to the public through another Open House Public Meeting. Once feedback response to that is received, the Executive Committee will be activated to ingest all the reaction and select the final recommended alternatives. After that happens, the finalists would undergo the detailed evaluations of an SEIS, the selection of a Supplemental Preferred Alternative for approval from the Acadiana MPO and Lafayette Consolidated Government, the production and release of the Draft SEIS document for official review, the official Draft SEIS Public Hearing for public review, the development of the Final SEIS document with the selection of the winning Supplemental Selected Alternative for final approval, and the Supplemental Record of Decision for the SSA that would then head back into the originally planned CSS Corridor Functional Design Plan process to develop the detailed design specifics.
And then the real process of finding funding for the project begins.
That is, unless the Sierra Club and the Concerned Citizens group decide to take another legal shot at derailing the project. Based on the continuing howls of Connector opponents like Michael Waldon, who runs the anti-Connector blog Connector Comments, that’s pretty much a guaranteed deal. Waldon attended Wednesday’s CSS meeting, and submitted comments restating his opposition based on the concerns about: how the Connector would threaten to pollute the Chicot Aquifer by unleashing the poisons of the former Southern Pacific Railroad classification yard through digging of pilings; how the elevated freeway would blast noise into the surrounding neighborhoods such that expensive sound walls would be necessary; and how elevated freeways in general are such the devil that cities are demolishing them in droves to make way for beautiful surface boulevards more appropriate for local development. And, of course, to push for the Teche Ridge Bypass through St. Martin Parish as a much more friendly alternative. Considering the progress that LADOTD is getting on completing the rest of I-49 South/freeway US 90 through Lafayette Parish, including the now under construction Albertsons’ Parkway interchange and the proposed interchanges at South Ambassador Caffery Parkway, Youngsville Highway, and Verot School Road, however, it may be a bit too little, too late for that.
Another (or related) alternative suggested by Connector opponents is to simply build the Grand Boulevard segment of the Evangeline Thruway right now as a standalone project, while fully obstructing in every way progress in building the Connector freeway. Strangely enough, some proponents of the Connector are also warming to the idea of a standalone Grand Boulevard-ization of the Thruway; the Lafayette City-Parish Consolidated Government and the ETRT just reached an agreement to make a push to apply for another US Department of Transportation TIGER grant (the same process that landed them funds for what became the ECI) to design and build the Grand Boulevard section as a interim stepping stone until the Connector gets funding. Whether this is real or simply a push to get LADOTD to drop in some more funding for the additional enhancements (Signature Bridge, bike/ped paths, hardscaping, Complete Streets, higher clearance) remains to be seen.
As always, watch this space for further updates.