Odds are, you’ve never visited Ruston, Louisiana, because it’s the kind of city you only see if you’re driving through Shreveport or couldn’t force yourself to attend LSU. Both are also five hours from New Orleans, the only place worth visiting in the entire state (sorry, Baton Rouge, but you know it’s true). While Ruston may not have a Cheesecake Factory, it does straddle I-20, making it a perfect location for Buc-ee’s to build its first Louisiana location. Which should be great for Ruston… except for the part where the Shreveport Times reports that preparing for all that extra traffic will cost the city millions.
Ah, yes. Our old friend, Infrastructure. It always costs more than you think it should, and that doesn’t always change once you learn that lesson. In order to get ready for all the drivers stopping for gas and brisket at Louisiana’s first Buc-ee’s, Ruston reportedly needs a new access road and some traffic light upgrades. That service road is expected to cost $3 million, and the traffic light upgrades will be about $8 million, bringing the total cost for the city of Ruston up to $11 million before the gas station even opens next April.
When Louisiana’s first Buc-ee’s does open, though, it’ll be big enough that you could easily see how a mere $11 million might not be enough to deal with all that newly concentrated gas station traffic. The store itself will be huge, clocking in at just under 75,000 square feet, the fuel center will have at least 100 gas pumps, and Buc-ee’s says it expects an average of about 15,000 cars a day (or 450,000 cars a month and more than five million cars every year). That’s a lot of traffic for a city that’s home to a university Forbes says is one of the top 106 colleges in the South.
It could easily be so much worse
If you’d argue the giant corporation building the giant gas station should probably be the one paying for the infrastructure upgrades instead of the city, you won’t hear any disagreements from me. I’d also argue they wouldn’t need the service road to better facilitate pickups and dropoffs at the local middle school if more kids just rode the bus, but alas. This is America. Still, once you look a little deeper into how much road infrastructure actually costs, you’ll quickly realize $11 million is actually pretty cheap…