Built in the 1920s, is Gervais Street bridge wide enough by today’s standards?
If you’ve ever driven across the Gervais Street bridge, which connects downtown Columbia and West Columbia over the Congaree River, and tensed up from the tight lanes, you’re not alone.
Built in the late 1920s, the quarter-mile bridge was built more than four decades before the enactment of the National Bridge Inspection Standards regulations. The iconic go-between, immortalized on postcards and hand-painted prints around Columbia, is narrower than what modern bridge design standards recommend.
When construction on the bridge was completed in June 1928, it had the widest roadway in the state. Now, its lanes are each about four feet shorter in width than is recommended for bridges built today.
On a bridge like it, the state’s transportation department would generally plan for the lanes to be around 12 feet wide, Terry Koon, a Structural Design Support Engineer with the S.C. Department of Transportation, explained. Gervais Street Bridge’s lanes are four feet shorter, around 8 to 9 feet wide.
Occasionally, the department will adjust the recommended width of lanes as needed to impact traffic patterns. For example, if the idea is that cars should be slowing down, the department might slightly tighten the lanes to make drivers pay more attention and drive slower in an area. And while that certainly happens on the bridge, with drivers often slowing down and not passing each other while driving across, the shorter lanes are more a byproduct of its age than intentions of the transportation department.
“It’s pretty hard to go back, once you’ve got a bridge built, and revise it to a higher design because it’s there. You might could do some retrofit or rehab, but you’re basically stuck with what you’ve got,” Koon said. “Our national codes have always been fairly good, although this one was built before any national code ever existed.”
South Carolina primarily relies on federal bridge and roadway design guidelines laid out by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO), as well as SCDOT’s own design guidelines. A publication from AASHTO lays out how bridges should be built and maintained and is typically updated every three years, Koon explained. SCDOT’s guidelines were written in 2006 and are updated through memorandums. The department is currently in the process of rewriting those standards, Koon told The State.
On top of having smaller lanes than most modern bridges, the Gervais Street bridge’s railings likely wouldn’t meet today’s standards for crash testing, Koon said.
The transportation department typically does not require old bridges to be brought up to newer standards, largely because once a bridge is built, it’s hard to make major changes, Koon explained. Plus, Gervais Street bridge is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, adding more rules and regulations to what potential changes could be made. The transportation department typically inspects bridges every two years.
Last year, an average of 26,900 drivers crossed the bridge daily, according to SCDOT traffic counts. The department has no active plans to reduce the number of lanes from four to two.
An earlier version of the bridge was built around 1827 and ultimately burned down in 1865 to delay General W.T. Sherman’s army during the Civil War, according to the National Register of Historic Places. Richland and Lexington counties purchased the rebuilt version of the bridge in 1912 and built a reinforced version for just shy of $600,000 ($10.8 million in 2025) in the late 1920s.
