For the second time in five years, a study is being done to find safer ways to walk across the Septima P. Clark Parkway where eight pedestrians have been struck and killed since 2012.
The S.C. Department of Transportation (SCDOT) has included the six-lane, mile-long parkway in an ongoing 2020 Pedestrian and Bicycle Safety Action Plan, said Kelly Moore, the agency’s director of public engagement.
While the study was underway, two pedestrians were fatally injured this year, including a 66-year-old Moncks Corner woman who was killed in June when a Folly Beach police officer driving a department cruiser struck her on his way to work.
“Work on the [safety] project began in the fall of 2022 and the report is expected to be finalized by the end of this year,” Moore said in an email to the Charleston City Paper. The agency has notified Charleston and Charleston County, Berkeley-Charleston-Dorchester Council of Governments, and the nonprofit Charleston Moves about its study.
The report will include recommendations, cost estimates and a time frame for improvements.
“From there, municipalities and other agencies will review those recommendations and consider them as a part of future projects,” she said. “In some instances, SCDOT will partner with the local municipalities to implement those recommendations.”
A dangerous intersection
Four of the eight pedestrians killed along the parkway and the lanes flowing from it have been hit at the Coming Street intersection. The mother of a College of Charleston student who was struck and killed at the crossroads and Westside residents are renewing calls for increased safety.
Audrey Lisbon, president of the Westside Neighborhood Association, said she will circulate a petition during the week of Aug. 28 calling for an elevated pedestrian crossing at the Coming Street intersection, more streetlights and improvements to an existing footbridge between the Coming Street and Rutledge Avenue intersections.
“There has to be some kind of safety measure there,” Lisbon said following a recent association’s meeting at the Arthur Christopher Community Center. If those improvements can’t be done, she added, then a police officer should be stationed at the intersection during rush-hour traffic.
“There used to be a traffic cop there years ago, but now we have an increase in traffic because of development,” she added. “Not only do we have more cars, we have more college students.”
Lisbon said she was not aware of the current SCDOT study.
“I would appreciate it if I can get that kind of information so I can let it be known to the community that a study is being done,” she told the City Paper.
Earlier this summer, Lisbon sent a letter to state and local elected leaders asking for increased safety measures along the parkway that opened in the 1960s as the Crosstown Expressway and was renamed in April 2010 to honor civil rights icon Septima P. Clark.
Lisbon said she emailed her July 31 letter to S.C. SCDOT Chief of Staff Justin Powell, Secretary of Transportation Christy Hall, the city’s traffic and transportation director, Robert Somerville, Gov. Henry McMaster’s office and Charleston Mayor John Tecklenburg. “I expected to receive a response from somebody,” she said.
In a text message to the City Paper, Moore said: “SCDOT does not have a record of receiving this letter, but we are working to get in contact with this community member to understand and address their concerns. We encourage anyone with a concern about a state-maintained roadway to be in touch with us directly at 855-467-2368.”
S.C. Rep. Wendell Gilliard, D-Charleston, said he would have suspected that Tecklenburg would have responded to Lisbon’s letter.
“I would think that this would be priority one because we are talking about the lives of our pedestrians,” he said.
Gilliard said S.C. Rep. Joe Bustos, R-Mount Pleasant, chairman of the Charleston County Legislative Delegation, “is committed to getting the DOT and the city together at the table to help resolve this issue.”
A grieving mother
College of Charleston junior 21-year-old Lindsey Taylor Ranz was struck and killed in January 2014 at the Coming Street intersection. Since then, her mother Lynette Ranz, with Gilliard’s help, has lobbied city and state elected officials for safety measures.
Two years before Ranz was killed, a 21-year-old exchange student from England at the College of Charleston was fatally injured at the intersection.
Lynette Ranz said she attended the meeting to warn the community “about the dangers of the Crosstown.” Along the roadway “cars go flying down to get to I-26 or U.S. 17,” she said. “I lost my 21-year-old daughter there. She was jogging after classes. I went down there after her funeral and stood there, and I questioned ‘Why is it like this? Why is nobody doing the speed limit?’ Too many people have lost their lives at the crosstown and that is why I am here.”
After her daughter’s death some improvements were made along the Crosstown where the speed limit is 35 mph. But those changes were not enough, Ranz said. “We are still losing lives.”
In the summer of 2018, Charleston installed new two-phase pedestrian signals at the Coming Street intersection that require pedestrians to cross the southbound and northbound lanes separately, waiting in the median of the six-lane roadway for the next signal before continuing to the other side.
At the Ashley Avenue and President Street crossings, advanced walk signals were installed to give pedestrians several seconds to cross the roadway before a green light is given to traffic in the parallel lane.
During the neighborhood association meeting, Brian Wolter, who lives near the Coming Street intersection, said a pedestrian can’t walk across the roadway before the light changes green. “You get stuck in the center every time,” he said. “It is frustrating.”
Before the crosstown
Burke High School’s legendary football coach Modie Risher in the 1960s encouraged students to be community leaders. Eighteen-year-old Arthur Lawrence was one of them.
When state officials asked for community input about the proposed Crosstown, Lawrence was among the students who attended meetings at city hall. “I asked ‘Why do you have to bring [the road] through the Black neighborhood,’ ” said Lawrence, who was the football team’s captain.
Eventually bulldozers crushed houses of elderly residents and dump trucks hauled the debris away, he recalled. “It was a difficult time because I knew those people,” he said. It was also troubling as portions of Kracke and Kennedy courts where he played sandlot football were paved over for the new road.
While Lawrence served with the Army in Vietnam, the Crosstown changed the city. But the traffic flow then was not as heavy as it is now, said Lawrence, a retired sergeant and a former president of the Westside Neighborhood Association.
“We didn’t have the population back then that we have now,” he said. “People are moving here every day, and everyone seems to be in a rush to get somewhere.”
Highway planners and city leaders “rushed to put the expressway into the city,” he said. “They didn’t think it out to see how it would affect the community, and how it would [years later] cause all these people to be killed.”
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