Travelers trying to get to Baton Rouge from New Roads and other places in Point Coupee Parish must make a decision.
They can either drive south and cross the river at U.S. 190 near Southern University, or they can take the $1 ferry to U.S. 61 and drive south.
But the state Department of Transportation and Development’s new bridge connecting New Roads and St. Francisville will offer drivers a more convenient alternative.
“There’s a lot of traffic across the ferry all the time,” said electrical engineering freshman John Harvey, St. Francisville native. “So it makes sense to make it easier for people to cross.”
Replacing the ferry, the John James Audubon Bridge will become the longest cable-stayed bridge in North America.
Cable-stayed bridges use cables to support their loads the same way suspension bridges do. Some widely known suspension bridges include the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco and the Brooklyn Bridge in New York.
The cables on such bridges that pass over towers transmit their load to onshore anchors on each end.
“But the cable-stayed bridges handle those forces internally within the structure and not on the two ends,” said Blaise Carriere, DOTD special projects assistant.
Carriere said the cable-stayed bridge, in which the towers alone bear the load, are necessary because Louisiana soil conditions are not conducive to resisting the heavy forces put on each end, like in suspension bridges.
The only other cable-stayed bridge in Louisiana that crosses the Mississippi River is in Luling at the Interstate 310 crossing south of Lake Pontchartrain.
The new bridge will connect Hwy. 1 in Point Coupee Parish east of Hospital Road with U.S. 61 in West Feliciana Parish south of St. Francisville.
“Most people probably pass through St. Francisville to get to Baton Rouge,” Harvey said. “So it’d make sense that they’d make it a bit closer to Baton Rouge.”
Of the three bidding competitors, a group of engineering and construction companies known as Audubon Bridge Constructors Joint Venture submitted March 2 the lowest bid of $334.7 million to both design and build the bridge, which will be 1,580 feet between its two main towers.
“But we gotta make sure we can pay for what they’re saying they want to do for us,” Carriere said. “We’ve now got what is the best proposal before us. It’s being analyzed to see if it’s financially sound and technically feasible.”
Carriere said the bid was close to the state’s revised estimate of the project following Hurricane Katrina. He said the price is high, but it is not unexpected with the rise in the cost of major structures both locally and nationally.
This rise in cost comes from an increased demand on materials such as cement and steel after Hurricane Katrina and a limited amount of skilled labor, Carriere said.
The group expects to be awarded the contract around mid-April.
Construction is expected to take three years with an anticipated completion date of June 2009.
The bridge is one of 16 projects under a major transportation program enacted by the state legislature in 1990 called the TIMED program, or Transportation Infrastructure Model for Economic Development.
The TIMED program marked the beginning of a four cent per gallon state tax on gasoline, in addition to the regular 16-cent tax.
For every gallon of gasoline now purchased in Louisiana, 20 cents is collected by the state, and 18.4 cents is collected by the federal government, resulting in a total fuel tax of 38.4 cents.
The new bridge also marks the first state highway project under the design-build process in which the DOTD combines the engineering and construction of a project into a single contract to a single entity.
The old process – the design-bid-build process – involved the separation of contractor and engineer in which each contractor had to bid on a single design.
Whether campus commuters from the area will benefit in travel time depends on whether the new bridge is connected to the proposed bypass in north Baton Rouge between Interstate 10 and La. 1, just north of Port Allen, said civil engineering professor John Metcalf.
The campus Office of Budget and Planning reports there are 155 students from Point Coupee Parish and 256 from West Baton Rouge Parish this semester.
But Metcalf said even with the new bridge in St. Francisville, those students on the other side of the river still have to deal with current state highway traffic unless the DOTD connects the bridge with a new bypass.
“The only way it will benefit students is if it reduces their travel time – if they build the bridge along with a four-lane connector to the (proposed) bypass or to Interstate 110,” he said.
But Carriere said the two projects are not related. The proposed bypass loop “is somewhat in limbo now,” he said.
 
Contact Chris Day at [email protected]