BATON ROUGE - New reflectors are now posted in the embattled Government Street medians because the state says it needs to protect the concrete curbs, but the location of the reflectors hint at who they're targeting. 

The new reflectors are in the medians that happen to be adjacent to the parking lots of the popular bars along Government Street. The medians outside of Radio Bar, MidCity Beer Garden, Superior Grill, Pelican to Mars, and Barracuda Taco all have new reflectors placed in them.

The only outlier is the median near the Albertsons grocery store. Rodney Mallett, a spokesman for the Department of Transportation and Development, says the trend is nothing more than a coincidence. 

"Those are medians that kept getting hit more than other medians so we're trying to do everything we can to make people more aware," Mallett said. 

Mallett said the reason the Government Street 'Road Diet' project was not only to reduce capacity along the heavily-traveled corridor, but also to cut down on crashes caused by distracted drivers and people making left turns. 

"While some people will complain about how this isn't a capacity project, you're right. This was a safety project because we had a large number of rear-enders, and a large number of side swipes," Mallett said. 

DOTD will add more reflectors as they see fit, according to Mallett.