Background
New Orleans Complete Streets Policy
The City of New Orleans recently sought to develop and apply a new "Major Street Design Process" to the N. Rampart Street Corridor—a major thoroughfare connecting Downtown New Orleans with the French Quarter, Tremé, and other downriver neighborhoods. The city aimed to create a collaborative approach, bringing community and agency stakeholders together earlier and in a more meaningful way than typically required by the city’s Complete Streets Policy. This collaborative design or scoping process is intended to go beyond the level of engagement required by the city’s Complete Streets Policy, to match stakeholders’ values and goals with best practices in multimodal design, and to build initial support for the reconstruction of the corridor. It is also intended to serve as a model for future transportation infrastructure design processes on Major Streets and to inform updates to city policies for stakeholder and community engagement.
Existing Conditions
North Rampart Street is a major corridor in central New Orleans acting as the edge between the French Quarter and Tremé neighborhoods, and connections to Louis Armstrong Park and the Lafitte Greenway. The surrounding area is generally residential downriver near St Bernard Street and transitions to more commercial developments as one moves upriver, where locals and tourists visit the various restaurants, bars, and shops. North Rampart Street is classified as a Principal Arterial Roadway with an Average Annual Daily Traffic (AADT) of approximately 22,000 in 2022 as reported by the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development (LaDOTD). In addition to motor vehicle traffic, the street experiences considerable pedestrian and bicycle activity and is serviced by the New Orleans Regional Transit Authority (NORTA) by bus and streetcar. An overview map and summary of roadway infrastructure along this multimodal corridor can be seen in Figure 1.
Proposed Conceptual Design
Collaborative Scoping Process
The City of New Orleans Department of Public Works engaged Toole Design Group to support a collaborative scoping process bringing together city staff, agency partners, and community stakeholders to establish shared values, identify corridor needs, and develop a concept design. The process was designed to engage stakeholders early in the project timeline—before the design phase—to develop a shared vision rooted in community values. The scoping approach emphasized transparency, consensus-building, and iterative development through a series of three stakeholder working group meetings held between August 2024 and February 2025. Key project goals included identifying corridor values, understanding tradeoffs, collecting multimodal data, and refining a corridor concept based on public input. The three working group meetings structured the process into phases of values definition, concept development, and refinement. In the first meeting, participants established guiding principles such as safety, access, equity, and cultural appropriateness. The second meeting introduced two preliminary design options—one featuring a two-way separated bike lane on the park side of the corridor, and another with directional bike lanes on both sides—for stakeholder critique through hands-on design activities and an online survey. The final meeting incorporated feedback from previous sessions and survey results into a refined concept, while also reflecting on the engagement process itself. Additional outreach was conducted to include stakeholders who were unable to attend. Altogether, the process produced a context-sensitive corridor design grounded in both technical analysis and community-driven values. A full summary of the collaborative scoping process, including recommendations for replicating the process in future projects to foster community ownership and support long-term policy goals for safer, more accessible streets in New Orleans, can be found in Appendix B.
Lafitte Greenway Connection Conceptual Design Elements
A key component of the North Rampart Street project is to provide a safer, more formalized connection to the Lafitte Greenway, including two-way separated bicycle lanes and sidewalks along both sides of Basin Street. The design includes widening the existing ~ 8-foot-wide sidewalk along the edge of Armstrong Park on “little” Saint Peter and Basin Streets to create a 10-foot shared-use path which, along with a one-way bicycle lane (eastbound) added to Toulouse Street, formalizes existing walking and bicycling travel patterns with several improved safety elements. For river bound users of the Lafitte Greenway, the shared-use path maintains the greenway user experience until its connection with the North Rampart Street two-way separated bicycle lane and sidewalks. Along both sides of Basin Street, the design recommends constructing a curbed, planted buffer between the existing bicycle lanes and vehicle traffic to provide separation between bicyclists and motor vehicles and add bidirectional access for people bicycling along the east side of Basin Street. Alternatively, a more short-term approach could use pavement striping and vertical delineators to make geometric changes along Basin Street, which could be formalized with curb and planted buffers in a future phase.
Conclusion
The traffic study performed for North Rampart Street in New Orleans underscores the importance of the corridor as a popular multimodal thoroughfare connecting the French Quarter and Tremé neighborhoods in addition to key destinations such as the Lafitte Greenway and Louis Armstrong Park. Key findings from the study, which included traffic volume data, turning movement counts, and public input from three stakeholder meetings and a survey, underscore the need for significant safety improvements.
Some primary observations included:
• High Traffic Volumes: Daily traffic reached 23,300 ADT at points along the corridor, with significant pedestrian, bicycle, and transit activity.
• Speeding Issues: Despite a 35-mph speed limit, speeds exceeded safe thresholds, with 85th percentile speeds reaching 40 mph and maximum speeds recorded as high as 70 mph.
• Crash Data: From 2019-2023, there were 588 crashes in the corridor, involving 38 bicyclists and 34 pedestrians, with two fatal crashes noted just outside the dataset period.
Informed by traffic volume, turning movement counts, and the speed studies – as well as public input gathered through the three stakeholder meetings and survey –the need for significant safety improvements along the corridor was determined. These include safety measures that improve safety for drivers of motor vehicles as well as vulnerable road users such as improved visibility at intersections, separation of bicycle facilities, and intersection improvements.
The proposed improvements included:
• A two-way separated bicycle lane on the west side of North Rampart Street.
• Narrower vehicle lanes to encourage safer speeds.
• Defined on-street parking to improve visibility and reduce illegal parking.
• Relocated transit stops to improve safety and efficiency for transit riders and drivers alike.
• Fully signalized intersections at St Philip Street and St Ann Street based on the warrant analysis.
Additional improvements aim to extend the Lafitte Greenway to North Rampart Street on St. Peter Street and Toulouse Street, addressing gaps and aligning with bicyclist behavior. These measures collectively aim to create a safer, more accessible, and equitable corridor for all users of North Rampart Street in New Orleans.
Questions:
Project Updates
Two rounds of stakeholder workshops were held. The third and final stakeholder workshop will occur in January 2025 (date to be announced).
To view November Meeting Overview, Click Here