State transportation agency to get long-awaited Bull Street traffic study next week

A long-awaited traffic impact study for the Bull Street complex will be in the hands of state transportation officials for review next week, easing their worries about how long the master developer has taken to complete the study.

Bryan Jones, the S.C. Department of Transportation’s district engineer for metropolitan Columbia, must approve construction on the state-owned roads on the 181-acre site and traffic’s effect on those roads and nearby roads. He said he learned Wednesday the study would be in the hands of agency engineers sometime next week.

Transportation officials had been growing antsy. They expected the study for the large property in the heart of Columbia by the end of the year. Then by Feb. 5, Jones said.

But transportation department engineers heard nothing since a Feb. 1 meeting, until Wednesday, he said.

Robert Hughes, son of BullStreet neighborhood master developer Bob Hughes and a partner in planning the project, said he is unaware of any previous deadlines.

“We are excited to be in the final stages of this process,” Robert Hughes said in an email to The State newspaper. “For the past several months we have been working on a comprehensive traffic study for the entire BullStreet project.”

Among the key issues agency engineers will be examining is whether the projected volume of traffic will require new entrances to the site’s new $37 million, city-owned baseball stadium and other parts of the development; new or different turning lanes; traffic signals; pedestrian pathways and crosswalks; and how increased traffic might affect quick access by emergency vehicles to nearby Palmetto Richland and Palmetto Baptist hospitals, Jones said.

Jones expects the study by Kimley-Horn and Associates, the engineering firm Hughes hired to do the analysis, will address the traffic implications of the entire proposed residential, retail and office neighborhood. Jones said he has been told the study addresses the site’s three phases of construction.

The study is expected to show 33 intersections that involve state-owned roads, not all of which abut the Bull Street site, Jones said.

The DOT will not have to sign off on changes proposed for city-owned roads at the site. That means that if the state report is still under review weeks from now, that would not stop April 14 opening day events, Jones said. Portions of Colonial Drive and Calhoun Street are city maintained, as are the roads being built by the city immediately around Spirit Communications Park.

Typically for a project the size of Bull Street, a traffic impact study would fill about 100 pages, Jones said. He estimates it will take his staff about a month to determine whether it accepts what Hughes’ engineers have devised or whether the agency will require changes.

This story was originally published February 26, 2016 at 1:55 PM.