When Matt Holland first heard about plans to revamp the intersection of Johnston Street and Bertrand Drive, a marquee project for then newly elected M-P Monique Boulet, he was intrigued.
An avid cyclist, bicycle safety advocate and member of the Lafayette Bicycle and Pedestrian Committee since 2019, Holland said in his eyes any project that made Lafayette’s streets safer for cyclists and pedestrians was a good project.
When he finally saw the detailed plans for the new layout, however, some disappointment set in.
“I wouldn’t feel comfortable walking my baby through that intersection we saw,” Holland, who himself is soon to become a dad, says of the complicated layout of crosswalks and islands that his committee was presented with earlier this year.
As the newest plan to make Lafayette more bike and pedestrian friendly, the Johnston/Bertrand project has resurfaced frustrations among advocates who have wrangled with the changing priorities of successive administrations at city hall.
They’re vexed by an enduring question: Why is it so hard to improve safety for cyclists and pedestrians in Lafayette?
Priorities, priorities
It wasn’t just the design of the project that left Holland puzzled. He wondered why this particular intersection — a complex redesign that would likely take years — had risen to the top of the list.
Because there is a list. Part of the work Holland’s committee has been tasked with is to identify projects that would have the most impact and are as achievable as possible. Progress on those projects, however, has often lagged or stalled altogether.
“It’s incredibly frustrating,” Holland says. “Why does it take two, three years, maybe more, to build a 10-foot wide sidewalk?”
This example isn’t pulled out of thin air. The committee advocated for a small project on Eraste Landry that members say would have meant big gains in connectivity with relatively little investment. “It’s super low-hanging fruit,” Holland says. “Why not do what was already in motion? And deliver some wins?”
The project is the subject of state dollars, a consistently slower process, but the delays have been compounded by a drainage impact study for an extremely small strip of the project, which planners say will take at least a year.
For committee members, this lack of action makes their work feel futile. Why convene a group of experts if they rarely get a say? “We’re not even really like an advisory committee,” says Holland. “We don’t have any actual say, so we are just sharing our opinion with them.”
The new project serves as an example, he adds. “All of a sudden now we’re doing this Bertrand project, and we’re moving heaven and hell in order to get it done. And it has the potential to be a very good project, but it was not high on the priority list.”
Competing timelines
One of the challenges, former Bike Lafayette President Andre Angelle says, is the change in priorities that comes with changing administrations.
“We keep having one-term mayors, but these are five-year plans,” says Angelle. “We get three years into the projects, and we get a new mayor.”
Each mayor-president spearheads projects of their own. Under M-P Josh Guillory, that was a path that would have connected Girard and Moncus parks through trails partially behind West Bayou Parkway, which has now been scrapped in favor of the new project.
As M-P Boulet sees it, the project achieves a similar goal as Guillory’s — creating better access to Moncus Park — but also serves as a more visible example of the benefits of projects like it. “I wanted a project that the vast majority of the community would engage in,” Boulet says. “And a lot more people engage in Bertrand than they do West Bayou Parkway.”
Designing the project in this way also gets around a political roadblock administrations before hers have faced: opposition from the wealthy, well-connected residents of West Bayou Parkway.
‘Classic NIMBY stuff’
Bike lanes have made for contentious politics along West Bayou Parkway for almost a decade.
Citing traffic safety concerns, neighbors pushed Joel Robideaux’s administration to remove bike lanes in 2016, igniting a fierce debate and rival petitions. Bike-lane supporters won out and the stripes remained, even as acrimony has resurfaced.
In 2022, the Guillory administration commissioned the design of an ambitious master plan that laid out a network of bike paths from Pontiac Point on Lafayette’s Northside to Rotary Point, the boat landing off West Bayou Parkway.
The first priority was a stretch of path that would connect Girard and Moncus parks, creating greater connectivity between the Downtown, Freetown and campus areas to one of the city’s biggest and newest assets, Moncus Park, and surrounding resources such as banks, restaurants and the only full-scale grocery store in the area.
There was just one problem: The design would lead the path through West Bayou Parkway.
West Bayou Parkway is one of the neighborhoods with the highest concentrations of wealth this side of town. According to census data, its residents have a median household income of $108,151, more than double that of the neighboring census tract, and more than triple that of the next one over — both areas the new bike path would have allowed easier access from.
This has led activists to believe a “not in my backyard” attitude — often referred to by the acronym NIMBY — has informed residents’ opposition to the plans for a path that would connect those neighborhoods to Moncus Park by way of theirs.
“It’s classic NIMBY stuff,” Holland says.
Boulet acknowledges that her decision to abandon the previous plan for the time being and push for a project that allows better access to the front end of the park, along Johnston Street, was at least in part informed by pushback from West Bayou Parkway residents.
“There was a lot of resistance from the people who lived there, a lot that I had been receiving throughout the campaign,” Boulet says. So she changed course.
“You cannot go into a neighborhood and change the whole character,” Boulet says of the subdivision. “It’s better for the whole community; we’re just changing your neighborhood” is not an argument she felt would resonate with her constituents in that area.
But creating access through the front of the park will present its own set of problems.
“There are congestion issues, huge congestion issues on the front side of the park, much more so than the back side of the park,” Boulet says. “And while the back, it would be nice to develop it out to West Bayou, and that’s the direction the park’s going in, the real challenges are on the front side of the park today.”
Now, one of those challenges will be incorporating bike and pedestrian crossings on an already busy intersection.
Bird in the hand
For the bicycle advocates, the whole process has resulted in an uneasy compromise. The new road design would require those crossing on foot or bike to wait several traffic light cycles to make it all the way across, waiting as traffic passes them by on all sides.
“The priority that we have publicly been given around this project is that we want to make it safer and useful for these kinds of vulnerable road users. But where it really matters, [LCG] created an overly complicated system for pedestrians in order not to affect motorized vehicles in a substantial way,” says Holland.
Designing it any other way, for example by way of a single light that would allow pedestrians to cross in one cycle, would have meant impeding car traffic on a road that is one of the city’s main thoroughfares and causing significant disruption, Boulet says.
“Monday through Friday, when people need the roadway to get to work, you’re not going to see a lot of pedestrians or bicycles,” she argues. Maybe, if utilization picks up, further changes could be made to make the intersection more accommodating to anyone outside of a car.
Disclosure: Mader Engineering, a company owned by the family of The Current’s editor, Christiaan Mader, is the contracted engineering firm on the Bertrand project.
To an extent, advocates like Holland feel like they have to take what they can get. “Right now, the pedestrian crossings at Johnson Street and Bertrand are deplorable,” he says. “Anything is improving on that.”
But they worry that favoring a project like Bertrand takes away resources and attention from projects that would have had a greater impact at a lower cost and on shorter timelines, and potentially turn public opinion against future projects of this kind by being costly and slow.
One thing is clear: By the time this project is done, Holland’s first child might be out of the stroller.