Council gives guidance to take Georgia Avenue traffic-calming design to SCDOT
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Summary
Consultants presented a traffic-calming package for Georgia Avenue that rejects a lane reduction, proposes narrower lanes, medians, RRFB pedestrian crossings, in-road warning lights and conversion of angled to parallel parking (reducing on-street spaces from 58 to 41). Council agreed to coordinate with SCDOT and use capital project sales tax funding.
Kimley-Horn consultant Joe presented the final design package for Georgia Avenue, a four-lane US 25 corridor through downtown. The team said traffic counts taken in August 2022 showed about 25,000 vehicles per day near the river and identified crash “hot spots” from five years of South Carolina Department of Public Safety data (about 300 crashes along the corridor over five years), concentrated in the downtown core.
Based on existing and projected volumes, the team eliminated a road-diet (lane reduction) as infeasible and instead proposed measures to calm speeds and improve pedestrian safety: narrowing travel lanes to 11 feet, adding stamped-brick 12-foot medians to create pedestrian refuge, installing RRFB (rectangular rapid-flashing beacon) crossings with optional in-road warning lights, enhancing high-visibility (ladder-style) crosswalks and converting angled parking to parallel parking to gain space for medians. The design reduces on-street parking from 58 existing spaces to 41 proposed spaces; staff noted a few spaces near Pine Grove may be removed to restore sight lines.
Councilmembers and staff discussed parking trade-offs and ADA parking adjustments and asked staff to include optional features (audible alerts, sensors) in the forthcoming RFP. Jim Clifford said the project will proceed to the South Carolina Department of Transportation for permitting and that construction procurement would come back as a contract award using capital project sales tax funds rather than SCDOT money.
Next steps: staff will submit plans to SCDOT for permitting (estimated permitting up to six months), refine landscaping and ADA details, and return with a procurement package and final contract authorization next summer.