What Happened to I-14, Louisiana’s ‘Newest’ Interstate Highway?

Motorists who travel across Louisiana from north to south and from east to west are no doubt familiar with Interstate 10 and Interstate 49. I-10 is the major east/west thoroughfare that runs across the southern section of the state, with a little help from I-12.  I-49 is the state's major north-south roadway that stretches from Lafayette in the south to Shreveport/Bossier and beyond in the north.

There are plans still in the works that would extend I-49 along the basic path of U.S. 90 from Lafayette through Morgan City and eventually to New Orleans. That project has been under consideration for quite a number of years.

Another project that first saw the light of day back in the early 2000s was the proposed "14th Amendment Highway" or "the Gulf Coast Strategic Highway". Planners like to give expensive projects fancy names so they will appear to be even grander in the eye of the public.

The roadway actually exists in Texas for an outrageous length of 24.8 miles. It's just slightly longer than the Atchafalaya Basin Bridge but if the plan to "extend I-14" ever comes to fruition the roadway would be a lot longer than that.

The expanded version of I-14 calls for the roadway to extend from Central Texas through Central Louisiana. The path in Louisiana would enter Louisiana near Fort Jackson in Vernon Parish.

The roadway would then travel eastward along a similar path as Louisiana Highway 28 to Alexandria. From there the road would carry motorists through Jonesville and eventually out of the state near Vidalia at the Mississippi River.

The project received funding as part of the bipartisan infrastructure bill. So why haven't we heard more about this new "pathway" and "gateway" to Louisiana? The Louisiana Department of Transportation defunded the project in 2023.

State officials determined that the $7 billion in funding that would be required to bring the project to completion would be better spent on improving, revitalizing, and repairing the infrastructure of existing roads and bridges in the state. Given the fact that so many of our state's roads and bridges are in a state of disrepair, it was pretty easy to see how transportation officials made that choice.