Louis Armstrong International Airport has secured $8 million in federal funding to begin work on a much-needed roadway that will connect the new passenger terminal on the north side of the airport to the overflow parking garage, employee parking area and rental car lots on the south side of the campus.
The award, which came from the Biden administration’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill, is a fraction of the estimated $97 million that will ultimately be needed to complete the project. But airport officials said it is enough to begin design and prep work on the site.
No groundbreaking date has been set but the target completion date is fall of 2025, airport spokesperson Erin Burns said.
Part of the timeline depends on funding. Burns could not say where the additional $89 million will come from, but she said airport officials are pursuing several federal infrastructure grants.
Passengers travel through Louis Armstrong International Airport in Kenner , La. Monday, June 22, 2020.
“It won’t all come from bonds,” she said.
Long overdue
The connector road has been a priority of airport officials since before the new terminal opened in 2019. Passengers and employees traveling from the rental car and parking facilities on the airport’s south side now have to take shuttle buses through mixed traffic on the airport access road and Veterans Memorial Boulevard to reach the north terminal.
A Southwest Airliner lands at Armstrong International Airport in Kenner, La. Monday, June 22, 2020.
The connector will be a separate roadway on pilings that travels on the east side of the campus. Going north from the south terminal, it will be positioned between the current airport access road and fence line, then snake around a runway to the north terminal.
Airport officials could not immediately estimate how much time the new road will save users, but they said it will reduce traffic congestion and improve safety and mobility in the area.
Added benefit
The new roadway is also significant because it will connect the terminal to a stop for a planned Amtrak rail line to Baton Rouge that would travel through the airport’s south campus. Once built, the road would allow passengers on the proposed rail line to swiftly travel to the north terminal after they disembark at an Amtrak stop near the old south terminal.
Amtrak sits on the tracks at the New Orleans Union Passenger Terminal in New Orleans, La., Wednesday, April 20, 2022. Governor John Bel Edwards met with the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development Secretary Shawn Wilson and Amit Bose, the Federal Railroad Administrator, as they traveled by passenger train from Baton Rouge to New Orleans. (Photo by Sophia Germer, NOLA.com, The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate)
Airport officials said Monday the connector road is independent of the rail project and will go forward regardless of when or whether the rail terminal is constructed.
Economic development officials from Baton Rouge and New Orleans have been working on the rail project for more than a decade and are closer than ever before toward making it happen.
Still, many hurdles have to be cleared before rail service between the two cities, which ended in 1969, can become a reality. Several funding commitments must be finalized before construction can begin.
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