Neighbors: Major housing project chance for USC to reduce traffic

On Sunday mornings, Dick Harpootlian can take a five-minute drive from his Wales Garden home to his downtown Columbia law firm.

But that drive time inflates to 30 minutes when classes are in session at the University of South Carolina’s downtown campus, Harpootlian said. Much of that drive is spent waiting at stop lights as students zoom to class in cars, he said.

Some downtown residents worry a major student housing development planned for the southern half of USC’s campus will only make things worse.

USC has suggested some concessions to soften the development’s impact on traffic. Those include eliminating the commuter parking lot there and limiting on-site parking to “Campus Village” residents, providing shuttles to discourage students from driving and exploring options for steering cars away from Pickens Street, which borders the neighborhoods.

Residents like those ideas, but they also want officials to commit to studying and solving USC’s big-picture impact on traffic before going forward with the project.

“Those traffic studies should be done before a single spade of earth is turned for any new development,” Harpootlian said. “We ought to come together to learn what that campus is going to look like 20 years from now.”

Neighborhood leaders periodically have met with USC officials to discuss their concerns for the plan, which calls for tearing down four 1970s-era residence halls with 1,200 beds and replacing them with a parking garage and three- to six-story residential towers for up to 3,800 students.

“We’re looking at one piece of the jigsaw puzzle,” said Kit Smith, one of several neighborhood leaders in talks with USC officials. “The impact of the university on our city, on our neighborhoods is much bigger than that piece of the puzzle.”

Columbia has not studied USC’s total impact on traffic and currently has no plans to do so, city traffic engineer David Brewer said. But he said he thinks the state’s flagship university has a relatively small impact on rush hour traffic because many students already live on or near campus.

Brewer guessed Columbia’s rush hour “traffic might reduce about 10 percent in the summertime whenever USC is out of session.”

Neighbors might balk at that estimate. One example of USC’s impact, Smith said, can be found around lunchtime at the intersection of Blossom and Assembly streets, when the four-lane streets clog as USC’s fraternity and sorority members travel to the nearby Greek Village for lunch.

“Between 11 and 2, you cannot move on Blossom and Assembly,” Smith said. “It’s jam packed.”

Harpootlian and other neighbors have said USC should look to become more pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly as its student population grows.

“At most major universities around the country, kids don’t have their cars parked outside their door,” Harpootlian said.

USC agrees with residents on many issues, including making campus more pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly while enhancing campus shuttle services, spokesman Wes Hickman said in an email to The State newspaper.

“This project is transformational; we are committed to getting it right for all and see a pathway forward,” Hickman said. “Therefore, we are diligently working to ensure a positive outcome for the local neighborhoods that meets their needs and those of our students.”

Smith said she expects to hear back from USC officials within the next two weeks. She said she hopes neighborhood leaders can show residents an updated version of USC’s plan before the end of May.

“We think we can accommodate more students with less impact,” Smith said. “That’s our goal. We’re not asking for more students, but we know the university is going to put them somewhere.”

This story was originally published May 4, 2016 at 6:06 PM with the headline "Neighbors: Major housing project chance for USC to reduce traffic."