Traffic piles up near Midlands elementary school, distressing neighbors. Is this the fix?
Irmo town officials want to cut down on speeding traffic that has caused at least five wrecks in a residential area. But first they need approval from the school district.
The town wants to add a speed hump to Chadford Road where it runs between Farm Creek Road and Royal Tower Road. Officials say more traffic calming devices are needed because construction elsewhere has made a cut-through of the area on the north side of town that includes Friarsgate Park and H.E. Corley Elementary School.
The latter has become the main sticking point in getting the new traffic measure installed. Because the S.C. Department of Transportation requires a certain number of signatures from property owners on the street, a new hump will need approval from a big one on Chadford — the Lexington-Richland 5 school board.
“The catch was Richland County handed us a clipboard and said to get signatures,” Irmo Councilman Erik Sickinger told school board members at its March 25 meeting. “We got the signatures, it’s not that different from campaigning for election, but one of those we need is from H.E. Corley... and we had to bring it to the board.”
Sickinger and fellow town councilman Gabriel Penfield spoke at the school board meeting about the need for a speed hump on the street. “But they have to follow Robert’s Rules of Order,” Penfield told The State, “so we could talk, but they have to put it on the agenda for the next meeting.”
The changes are needed because this stretch of Chadford is driven over by 3,400 cars per day, Penfield said, some of them headed to school or the park, but others bypassing traffic on Dreher Shoals Road or U.S. 76. The gridlock has led drivers to collide with other vehicles, trees and in one case even a boat trailer, the town councilman said.
“Everyone has a story of a car speeding on the road and hitting their mailbox,” Sickinger told the school board meeting.
The goal is to have speed humps installed on either side of H.E. Corley, which should not disrupt the daily flow of traffic picking up and dropping off students at the school, the council members told the school board.
Lexington-Richland 5 is set to hold its next school board meeting on April 22. Besides the school district, there’s still an effort underway to collect the signatures of all the property owners on Chadford. “If it’s approved, it will not be implemented for almost a year,” Penfield said, saying the traffic-calming measures will accompany a re-paving of the road. But a temporary speed hump can be installed in the meantime, he said.
“It’s paramount that we protect the students who live in that area, because the traffic is not limited to that neighborhood,” Penfield said.
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