The work that remade downtown Abbeville’s streets has earned the city a national title.

The Federal Highway Administration has named the City of Abbeville the national winner of its Putting Families First Innovation Award, a category added this year to the agency’s Build a Better Mousetrap competition. Abbeville is the first city to win it. The winning entry was the city’s “Downtown Revival Abbeville Street Improvement Project.”

FHWA’s winners page says the city “created a safer community-centered downtown environment through extensive public engagement and multimodal transportation planning.”

What the contest is

Build a Better Mousetrap is run by FHWA’s Center for Local Aid Support. It honors practical ideas from local road departments, cities and tribes, from homemade tools to new ways of planning. Entries reach the national round through each state’s Local Technical Assistance Program, and Louisiana’s program picked Abbeville as the state’s entry.

This year’s other national winners were public works crews and counties in New Hampshire, California, New York and Iowa, honored for a culvert-steaming truck, an AI street inventory, a snow-fence pole puller and a GPS survey rig. According to the city, FHWA weighed more than 100 entries from the 2025 and 2026 contest years before choosing.

What Abbeville built

The city says the project started as a plan to fix aging streets and safety problems in the Historic Main Street District, then grew into something bigger. Before anything permanent went in, the city held community meetings, ran traffic studies and set up a temporary demonstration so residents could try the changes and weigh in.

According to the city, the finished work includes:

  • Better pedestrian crossings and safer intersections
  • Traffic-calming features
  • Room for bicycles
  • New sidewalks
  • Decorative touches that reflect Abbeville’s history and culture

The goal, the city says, was a downtown that works for people “of all ages and abilities” and helps local businesses and events.

No money, but a bigger stage

The award does not come with any funding, the city says, but it brings national attention that could help with future grant applications and partnerships.

LeJeune, the city’s media and communications coordinator, prepared the entry. Next month he will walk transportation officials through the project in one of FHWA’s Innovation Exchange webinars. In March he takes it to Baton Rouge for the 2027 Louisiana Transportation Conference (March 7-10), where the state’s LTAP center plans to give Abbeville its national plaque.

The webinar “is an opportunity to share our project with transportation professionals and agencies from across the country, discuss what worked, and hopefully give other communities ideas they can use in their own projects,” LeJeune told the Times in an email.

He also credited Courtney Dupre, program manager for the state’s LTAP, with making sure the project was entered before the deadline. “It’s pretty exciting to see how far this project has gone,” he said.

Two other Louisiana projects were in this year’s state lineup: Calcasieu Parish’s flood warning system, built on over 100 gauges that track rain and water levels, and a St. Charles Parish repair method for the timber piles under a water intake in Luling.