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The Isle of Palms City Council got a look at five possibilities for re-striping the IOP Connector bridge recently, but, depending on which option is eventually chosen, the work might not be completed before the start of the summer beach season. The options were presented at a special Council meeting Dec. 13 by Rob Perry, state traffic management engineer with the South Carolina Department of Transportation.
Though two of the five options seemed to be received favorably by most of the Council and the city’s fire and police chief, one Council member said later that he wouldn’t vote to approve any of them.
“We need to demand that whatever is done on the Connector, safety is the first concern,” Council Member Blair Hahn said. “We need to have a hard barrier between the traffic lanes and the pedestrian and bike lanes, and we need to extend the height of the outside of the bridge. We should not choose expedience over safety.” Concept No. 3 would include an 11-foot travel lane in each direction, separated by a 10-foot wide median, and a 10-foot-wide multiuse path for walkers and cyclists on the west side of the bridge.
The current multi-use path on the east side of the bridge would be removed. Concept No. 5 would feature two lanes of traffic from Isle of Palms to Mount Pleasant, one lane going into IOP and a multi-use path on the west side of the bridge. Nothing but paint on the road would separate one of the Mount Pleasant-bound lanes from traffic entering IOP.
This plan would require widening and paving from the end of the bridge to where the road widens to two lanes in Mount Pleasant and changing the way vehicles approach the bridge from Palm Boulevard. Perry said he would present the possible options to the Mount Pleasant Council, hopefully no later than mid-January, then a 30-day comment period would follow to give area residents the opportunity to voice their opinions. He said a start and completion date for the project depends on which option is chosen. “With asphalt and turn lanes, it could be a whole year to get it done,” Perry commented. “I can’t promise anything by this summer.” In addition to reconfiguring the entrance to the bridge from the Isle of Palms, other possible changes on IOP could be making 14th Avenue a one-way street, which would require motorists to turn left coming out of the county park, rather than driving directly to the Connector bridge, Perry said. IOP officials are expected to receive a much more in-depth report, compiled by RK & K Civil Engineering, at the end of January.
Perry said the consultant originally came up with 12 options, but “some of them didn’t meet our minimum requirements.” At the Dec. 13 meeting, Council Member Jan Anderson voice her support for Concept No. 5, suggesting that the work could be completed in two stages “so we can move this project forward and get some relief.” “We should be able to double our traffic capacity coming off the island. On those summer days when it takes an hour to get off the island, what that means is it will probably take 30 minutes or less,” she said. Police Chief Kevin Cornett told the Council that Concept No. 3 is his favorite because “it gives me a center median for emergency vehicle access to and from the island and also gives me that center median to use to move traffic around a collision or to move a collision into.” He added that No. 3 also would keep police officers from having to move traffic into the pedestrian and bike lanes.
“Every time we have to move vehicles into that lane, we’re putting anybody utilizing those paths in a risky situation,” he said. Fire Chief Craig Oliverius said all the options “have their merits” and that “we could make all of them work.” He said No. 5 would make it easier for ambulances to get patients off the island, which, he said, is a necessity around 700 times a year. There is a downside to the plan, he pointed out.
“The part we did not like would be EMS coming to Isle of Palms or Mount Pleasant or other fire departments coming to assist us,” he said, adding that the small distance between opposing lanes could be a problem as well.
According to Perry, the work could be paid for from “different pots of money” by the state, the county or the Berkeley-Charleston-Dorchester Council of Governments.
