Improvements coming to roads in the College Drive area

BATON ROUGE, La. (WAFB) - “College Drive’s traffic has been pretty bad. I try to avoid it as much as possible, by driving on I-10 or going on Highland or Perkins because I mainly just had bad experience driving here,” Baton Rouge commuter Daniel Keaton said.

Congestion on College Drive is something East Baton Rouge traffic director Fred Raiford wants to tackle sooner rather than later.

“That will help ease some traffic congestion, but it still gives the business community the plus they need,” Raiford said.

The I-10 widening project is expected to divert more drivers to roads like College Drive.

“For the construction, I know it’s going to be pretty bad like there’s going to be awful traffic just ‘cause they’re doing construction. But I know after they’re done, a bunch of the traffic will hopefully be a lot better,” Keaton said.

So Raiford said they want to complete the first part of their plans before I-10 construction gets to College Drive.

“It won’t be work actually on College itself at this point. But there are some other ideas that we’re also looking at trying to ease some of the traffic congestion that on College on a day-to-day basis, regardless of when the I-10 widening and improvement is going to take place.”

Plans are in the design phase right now and will be shown to the mayor-president before being presented at a public meeting, possibly next month.

“From my standpoint, we’re going to look at trying to do some of this work before that takes place and there are some things we can do and it’s not necessarily within the College Drive right of way itself, but there are some improvements that we believe we can do and have that done probably beforehand,” Raiford said.

The first part of construction on I-10 is scheduled to start in early 2023.

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