Ongoing construction won’t impact traffic on game days

BATON ROUGE, La. (WAFB) - Thousands of people are expected to make their way to Tiger Stadium for the LSU football game Saturday night, but is construction on Nicholson Drive going to be a roadblock?

Even though the project is still ongoing, DOTD said they expect no lane closures for the game this weekend.

The Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development is making progress on improvements to Nicholson Drive and the surrounding corridor.

“Putting in new pavement, we’re changing the exit from Terrace St. to Oklahoma St., putting in sidewalks, doing drainage,” said LA DOTD Spokesperson Rodney Mallett. “It’s a massive project.”

Crews are currently finishing up the new Oklahoma Street bridge and expect it to be open soon, meaning an easier route to Tiger Stadium.

“It’s going to give you much easier access to Nicholson and River Road and that’s going to help you get to the stadium easier, especially on game days,” said Mallett.

“Right now, DOTD is patching areas of Nicholson Drive. They’re also looking to start drainage work and installing curbs before they repave the road,” added Mallett. Even though traffic can be worse, the department said their work can’t stop.

“We can’t not do this project because of football season because it’s going to overlap,” said Mallett. “Football season is almost six months out of the year, so we want to make this progress and Nicholson really needed to be overlaid.”

But DOTD said these roads should be open on Fridays and Saturdays during football season.

“I go to the LSU games too so we’re aware of the traffic on Nicholson, but we’re not having any lane closures,” said Mallett.

DOTD expects the project to be completed before the start of the 2024 football season.

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