Columbia moves to tame Assembly Street, a ‘dangerous’ downtown dividing line
Thousands of people cross downtown Columbia’s Assembly Street on foot each week, but for many it feels like a daily hazard.
“It’s Frogger,” said Stephen Ruxton, who, as an avid runner, crosses the wide, 6-lane roadway on foot almost every day.
“I’ve seen personally … people get hit at this intersection, pedestrians,” he said, pointing to the Gervais and Assembly streets intersection that bounds a corner of the South Carolina statehouse.
It feels dangerous, trying to make it across the wide downtown thoroughfare, which each day delivers an average of 25,400 drivers through Columbia’s core. City leaders have said the same for years.
Now the City of Columbia is moving forward with a years-old vision to redesign a portion of the street between Pendleton and Lady streets, meant to slow vehicles and make crossing Assembly Street safer and more comfortable for those on foot.
The work includes curb bump-outs at intersections that will shorten the trip on foot by 20 feet, wider sidewalks with new lights, and narrower traffic lanes to help slow down vehicles without cutting the roadway’s capacity. The plan also includes removing the existing median parking on Assembly and building a wide, landscaped median with pedestrian “refuges” on the median at intersections.
The project’s budget has climbed since leaders discussed the plans in Spring 2024, when the estimated price tag was around $16 million. Now, the cost has risen to about $21 million, said Assistant City Manager Clint Shealy.
The money is expected to come from multiple sources: $12.4 million from the S.C. Department of Transportation through its Guideshare program, $3 million from the state budget via an earmark, $600,000 from a Richland County program, and $5 million from the next Richland County penny sales tax fund.
The city and the South Carolina Department of Transportation held a public input meeting for the plans April 23, where multiple residents echoed the same sentiment. Designers are accepting public comment through May 15 via the project’s website.
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Right now, Assembly Street is “a space that pedestrians don’t feel like they belong,” said Ruxton, who manages Columbia’s Saturday street festival Soda City Market and spends a lot of time downtown.
The road was built wide on purpose. It’s 150 feet across — 50 feet wider than the rest of the streets on Columbia’s original 400 block grid. When the city was planned in the 1700s, founders thought wider streets would limit the spread of fire and disease.
But today, the design is a dividing line across downtown.
“It honestly is not a place that you want to walk, I hate to say it,” said James Ribaudo, a landscape architect who moved to Columbia in July.
Ribaudo, who occasionally walks the street and often drives it, said he supports narrowing lanes if it makes the street safer and more inviting.
“When you’re in a downtown, there’s a balance. Right now the scale is tipped toward cars,” he said, adding that to right that balance, the city might need to take some space away from vehicles. “I would be happy to go through the city a little slower if it’s way better for people.”
Project leaders expect that the public will have opinions on the narrower traffic lanes, and on the plans to remove the median parking, Shealy said.
“The parking impact is there, the safety impact outweighs that.”
Between creating more space for pedestrians and narrowing traffic lanes, designers also hope the project will result in fewer accidents on the busy street.
Down the entire stretch of Assembly Street, from Rosewood Drive to Elmwood Avenue, there were 1,603 crashes between 2018 and 2022. Those include 34 crashes involving pedestrians and 8 with bikes, according to a road safety audit published in 2024.
Of the over 1,600 crashes, more than 30% were rear-end collisions.
Shealy said eventually, the city would like to make changes all the way to Elmwood Avenue, though that is just an idea at this stage.
In 2013, the University of South Carolina led a $4.6 million project to make similar pedestrian improvements on Assembly between Blossom and Pendleton streets. That work included widening medians, shortening crosswalks and adding more lighting to sidewalks. This next phase of work on Assembly Street would pick up where that project left off.
At the same time, further down Assembly Street SCDOT is also looking at adding around a mile of new sidewalks around George Rogers Boulevard outside of Williams-Brice Stadium.
The city expects the project’s design to be finished and to begin looking for contractors by Spring 2027. Construction is expected to take 18 months.
