It’s the busiest road in Lexington County. What can be done to stop the grind?
It’s Lexington County’s busiest, and sometimes most infuriating, stretch of roadway.
U.S. 378 — the main artery carrying people from the Congaree River to downtown Lexington and vice versa — gets more than 43,000 commuters daily on some of its busiest stretches. The highway can also be a traffic nightmare for residents trying to drive through during its busiest times.
John Knauff drives the route regularly from his home in Lexington to his job at Lexington Medical Center.
“It’s busy no doubt,” Knauff said. “With all the construction at Malfunction Junction, now people are using 378 as a shortcut, which makes it worse. That stretch between I-20 and I-26 has been a lot more congested since it started.”
Malfunction Junction, where I-20, I-26 and I-126 merge, is undergoing a multi-year redesign that’s intended to smooth traffic flow through the area.
Knauff believes the growth in housing along Corley Mill Road, near River Bluff High School, has also contributed to the problem, since the road ends at U.S. 378 right by the ramp off of Interstate 20. Coming from the other side toward the same intersection is traffic from three schools — Meadow Glen Elementary, Meadow Glen Middle and Northside Christian Academy — that exits from Ginny Lane in the same spot.
How to solve that problem isn’t simple, or cheap. When Lexington County put together a list of road projects that could have been funded by a proposed 2022 penny sales tax, major changes to the county’s busiest roadway were dropped as too expensive.
Kyle Clampitt, a consultant with Alliance Engineering who worked with a county committee to finalize the list, said at the time widening U.S. 378 is a “very tall task” that would require feasibility studies, right-of-way acquisition and utility movement that would add up to a projected $137 million.
That would have been close to a quarter of all revenue expected to be raised by the penny tax over its eight-year life span. Lexington County voters ultimately voted down the penny tax in a November referendum.
County Council Vice Chairman Darrell Hudson said the county is limited in what it can do to address traffic on U.S. 378 outside of a comprehensive penny tax, because it’s a state-maintained road.
“We don’t have the money to do anything except county roads,” Hudson said, except for a set amount of funds the county receives from the S.C. Department of Transportation for local road maintenance. “But most of those are patching and resurfacing on small strips.”
SCDOT told The State the department currently has no projects planned for U.S. 378.
During the process of coming up with the list of penny tax projects, Clampitt expressed skepticism that road widening would alleviate traffic problems on U.S. 378 that bedevil the county’s drivers, and pointed to other items that could alleviate traffic.
Although widening U.S. 378 was not proposed as part of the penny sales tax program, the plan did call for the following improvements, which would have cost $11.6 million, according to the penny tax study.
▪ $6,710,000 for intersection improvements and the addition of turn lanes onto Hope Ferry
▪ $1,487,600 for the 500 feet east of Coventry Drive, adding a right turn lane for westbound traffic and median improvements
▪ $1,137,500 for a traffic signal and other improvements at the intersection with Henbet Drive
▪ $1,109,700 at the intersection of West Main Street and Gibson Road in Lexington, adding turn lanes and a through lane
▪ $640,200 for improvements to West Main Street between Derrick and Thompson streets, including Town Square shopping center and the Lexington Medical Center Urgent Care.
▪ $400,000 for signal improvements on Sunset Boulevard between Meeting Street and Interstate 26
▪ $152,900 for intersection improvements with Park Place Trail
Hudson says he’s been “begging, begging, begging to get an intersection on Calks Ferry Road, so all this traffic will not go through town if you’re coming from Batesburg-Leesville and west Lexington.”
Knauff is also skeptical that widening U.S. 378 would alleviate the problems because an increase in lanes might tempt more motorists to use the road, he says.
Knauff thinks the solution might simply be more drivers finding their own alternate routes down side roads, such as the more “homey” drive he says he takes down U.S. 1 when he wants to avoid traffic. But he has friends in some adjoining neighborhoods who are concerned about increased traffic spilling onto residential streets.
“It’s a shame for the people in those little neighborhoods to be used as shortcuts, because they’ve got kids who might be playing with a basketball hoop out in the street, and now there’s more cars shooting through,” Knauff said.
He also said improvements to Interstate 20 in recent years have also made driving across the county easier, and he sometimes uses that as an alternate route to U.S. 378, something he thinks more people might be doing with the end of long-running roadwork in the area.
But the Lexington resident does think the town has done good work on its end of the highway, praising a smoother drive he’s noticed between North Lake Drive and Gibson Road.
“Whatever they did with traffic signals works pretty well,” he said. “In the afternoons, I go to our community medical center across from the old K-Mart, and the traffic’s not terrible.”
The town of Lexington has improved computer-driven signalization on U.S. 378 from the split with U.S. 1/West Main Street at one end of town to close to Lexington Medical Center, said town transportation director Randy Edwards, reducing the travel times by 20% for Knauff and his co-workers.
Knauff said his father, who lived in Lexington for almost 30 years until he moved to North Myrtle Beach in 2017, has commented on the improved traffic situation around town on visits back.
Edwards said improving any road conditions can be a complicated endeavor that requires not just funding but cooperation from multiple government agencies. A major project can be threatened by everything from the availability of contractors and resources to the state of the economy or the weather.
“A turn lane that used to cost $200,000 is now upwards of half a million dollars,” Edwards said. “That’s driven by numerous factors; inflation, labor, material resources, contractor resources.”
In recent years, the town of Lexington has spent $2 million to add a lane to Ginny Lane, part of a larger plan to improve traffic on the “Corley Mill Gateway” to improve traffic flow between U.S. 378 and I-20, including potentially adding a second roadway to split traffic heading towards and away from the interstate.
“That’s a $30 million investment into that corridor,” Edwards said. “We have some funds lined up, but it will take significant funds because of the changes being proposed there.”
Further down the road, the town of Lexington has already improved the intersection with Old Cherokee Road by adding a five-lane interchange, and in the fall will accept bids for an additional lane at North Lake Drive and Sunset Boulevard.
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