BATON ROUGE - The plans to widen I-10 and I-12 are welcome for a majority of drivers in the Capitol City. But some wonder what more traffic will mean for peace and quiet in neighborhoods along the route.

"Our goal is to make a needed transportation improvement at the same time to try to make the community better off than what it is today," says Eric Kalivoda, the deputy secretary of DOTD.

Part of Friday's announcement calls for ways to drown out noise during the construction period and afterward. DOTD says it will likely relocate these existing sound-walls.

"We don't want to put up something and then have to bring it back down," Kalivoda says.

Since federal laws strictly produced ways on how to muffle out sounds associated with the highway, the state's message about noise today plans to address it.

"There are federal analysis and criteria that has to be met and analysis that has to be done to determine what types of noise mitigation. Most people think of noise walls and that's certainly the primary noise mitigation that we'd be considering,"
Kalivoda says.