Columbia police are writing more tickets along this downtown street. Why?
A flurry of new construction in a growing Columbia corridor has created a traffic headache for the people who live there. Columbia police have gotten involved, but as construction promises to continue, residents are bracing for things to get worse before they get better.
River Drive, north of Elmwood Avenue in downtown Columbia, is not normally considered a major traffic problem for the city. But the corridor bounded by River Drive, Sunset Drive and North Main Street is changing, bringing new growing pains with it.
“Took 32 minutes to get home from the corner of Hampton and Main. Something needs to be done. There were people driving through the dirt path in the Earlewood garden area off river drive and cutting people off. We need an officer or something to stop people from breaking the law to avoid traffic,” one Earlewood resident wrote on Facebook in late October.
“The traffic on River Drive has become really dangerous. Cars are flying 4550 miles an hour. People are swerving around cars trying to turn instead of waiting,” wrote another resident.
The current problems on River Drive are most likely being caused by a major construction project on the adjacent Sunset Drive, which began in April. Sunset Drive traffic has periodically been rerouted down River Drive, causing the new traffic issues.
Columbia Police became involved in September, after residents began reaching out asking for intervention.
“The Traffic Safety Unit has been conducting enforcement as time permits to maintain a presence on River Drive as the concerns are present,” reads a Nov. 8 memo from the Columbia Police department. “This has been problematic due to other demands and high-profile crash investigations.”
Between September and October, police wrote 20 traffic tickets to motorists on River Drive, five were for collisions. But the police department also reported seeing “little to no speeding” during major commuting hours, and said the bulk of the written citations were also not given during rush hours.
In addition to writing tickets, the police department also installed a temporary speed trailer, which warns drivers when they are going too fast. “Unfortunately, the results of the 2-month long speed study could not be retrieved due to a processing error in the device that has since been corrected,” the memo adds.
Columbia City Councilman Tyler Bailey said he has been working with the police department to see if there is anything the city can do to reduce the traffic problems. The State contacted the police department for additional information but didn’t hear back before this article’s publication.
“The people who are having complaints, those complaints are valid,” Bailey said.
More and more projects
The Sunset Drive work is a $5.2 million project, paid for with the Richland County transportation tax, that promises to upgrade the utilities, pave the road and build a new, 5-foot wide sidewalk from River Drive to North Main Street. That project will be under construction until potentially mid-2025. That work has rerouted drivers, who would typically take Sunset, down River Drive instead.
But that construction is only part of a slate of recently finished, currently underway and upcoming projects, promising that the corridor will not slow down anytime soon.
In October, the city of Columbia announced the South Carolina Department of Transportation would be installing new, buffered bike lanes on the length of River Drive between North Main Street and Sunset Drive. That work just finished.
Two new apartment projects are also being added to the area: the recently built Benton Crossing on River Drive and North Main Street, which centers affordable housing; and the soon-to-be-constructed, 300-unit market-rate apartments at the corner of Sunset and River drives that will see a long-vacant shopping center repurposed.
Next year, a portion of River Drive could close for nearly a year as the SCDOT prepares to replace a bridge over the CSX railroad. That project would close River Drive and reroute traffic to Sunset Drive and North Main Street.
“We would obviously like to limit a huge increase in traffic for a year-long detour. That would be very disruptive to our neighborhood,” said John Wilkinson, president of the Elmwood Park neighborhood association. But Wilkinson said despite the problems being created by the detours, he doesn’t think the area has a traffic problem.
To be clear, traffic is increasing.
River Drive sees far less traffic than Sunset Boulevard, but it is still busier than it used to be. A decade ago, an average of 4,800 people traveled the road each day. In 2023, that number rose to over 6,000 drivers per day, according to SCDOT data.
Meanwhile, Sunset Drive has become a major thoroughfare, with an estimated 20,300 cars traveling the stretch between River Drive and Main Street each day. A decade ago that number was 18,300.
But Wilkinson said he thinks the area has the capacity for it, as long as the growth is managed with residents in mind.
“A lot of people complain about traffic, but we want the development and we know that will come with some more traffic, but the benefits are going to far outweigh any negative impact,” Wilkinson said.
But he added there are still things that can be done to make the area safer, like creating more connectivity between the neighborhoods in that area, so it’s easier to move between the neighborhoods without needing to use a busier street.
“I think you could have that volume of traffic in a configuration that’s more pedestrian friendly,” Wilkinson said.
Bailey said that if the traffic situation does change dramatically after the Sunset Drive construction and new apartments are finished, he thinks the city would look at longer term solutions at that point.
“If it is some increased traffic measures that we need to look at addressing, we will address those,” he said.
