Advocates, city council still waiting
It’s a waiting game for King Street one month after Charleston City Council agreed to put together a community of stakeholders to come up with a new recommendation for the long-contested corridor originally slated to get a bike lane by the South Carolina Department of Transportation (SCDOT).
This lack of progress runs counter to the expected timeline.
“If we don’t have [a committee] put together by mid-October, we’re not doing our job. We need to move on,” city councilman Mike Seekings, chair of the city’s Traffic and Transportation Committee, told the Charleston City Paper in late September. Yet as of the committee’s Oct. 10 meeting, there was no committee — and there were no potential stakeholders.
To some people who care about a new bike lane, the city’s delayed action comes as yet another roadblock in what Belvin Olasov, co-director and co-founder of Charleston Climate Coalition (CCC), a nonprofit creating alliances to tackle the global climate crisis, says is “a frustrating process.” He added that if and when the bike lane is approved, it won’t be implemented until probably around 2026 or 2027, much later than the initial SCDOT proposal.
Updates on this committee from the mayor’s office haven’t set a clear timeline, either.
“Secretary [of Transportation Christy] Hall and Mayor [John] Tecklenburg are currently in contact about next steps for King Street, and the mayor will begin appointing members of the stakeholder committee as soon as that process is complete, said city spokesman Jack O’Toole last week. “In the meantime, SCDOT is moving forward with the larger downtown safety plan, which will bring much-needed safety improvements throughout the area,” he added.
A history of stalling
What’s clear to many is that King Street has a problem. SCDOT’s 2022 Bike Safety and Action Plan listed it as one of the most dangerous in the state in regard to pedestrian and cyclist crashes.
Katie Zimmerman, director of Charleston Moves, said a crisis of pedestrians and cyclists being harmed or killed by motorists extends statewide — and it’s evidenced by an SCDOT road safety action plan. Her organization is a nonprofit that encourages mobility by bicycle, foot and public transit in Charleston.
The SCDOT auditing process took place from 2019 to 2020, as documented by the city council website. To complete the audit, Zimmerman said, SCDOT officials discussed what was going on in the corridor and other dangerous areas before they went on-the-ground to see actual conditions.
They observed potential problems and how folks were “using the space,” she told the City Paper. Then came suggestions, all of which were taken into consideration when the department analyzed the data and conducted a cost-benefit analysis to see what might be the safest and “most bang for the buck” solution, Zimmerman said.
Seekings said the road safety audit process happened during the middle of the Covid pandemic, so any public engagement meetings then “maybe weren’t as well-publicized or attended as they might have been.”
But following the audit, SCDOT proposed the federally funded transportation plan during a fall 2022 meeting — long after Covid peaked. It included the original recommendation for a bike lane on three sections of King Street with different widths and buffers based on the specific needs of each block (see figure on the right). Then came a 30-day online public comment period, she said. The responses to the proposal, according to Zimmerman, were overwhelmingly positive.
It was only after the 30-day period ended in fall 2022 that the “whole thing started to unravel,” she added.
What’ll happen to business
In a motion to defer the proposal at an August meeting, council member Caroline Parker said the city has “heard from the cyclists; we’ve heard from the community. We need to hear from the stakeholders as well.”
But Olasov questioned what she and others really mean when they use that term. The Charleston City Council has already heard from local residents — some 4,000 people from the community sent emails to council voicing their opinions, he said. “When you say stakeholders, you mean wealthy business owners,” Olasov said.
One document which shows the city held a meeting with Lower King Street business owners and Charleston Downtown Alliance in December 2022 only came out in June of this year, six months after the meeting.
What’s more, CCC program manager Rowan Emerson spoke of canvassing efforts it did with business owners on King Street. “Either they didn’t know about the proposed bike lane, or they’re like, ‘Yeah, we support that,’ ” Emerson said.
And that might be because there’s an economic reason to support the bike lane, Zimmerman said. Studies show that in a worst case scenario, an added bike lane might keep business sales neutral, she told the City Paper. “But by and large, what usually happens is sales skyrocket.”
Plus, it’s also about the employees. Zimmerman said when Charleston Moves circulated a petition in support of the bike lane, they asked signees to comment about how they used the King Street corridor.
After reading some of these comments, she noticed a trend — people who work on King were getting hit by motorists — multiple times, even. These are people who have to bike to work, she added — people “who either can’t afford a motor vehicle, or they don’t want to have to deal with the cost.”
College of Charleston weighs in
After a CCC Freedom of Information Act request, the College of Charleston (CofC) released two letters signed jointly by President Andrew Tsu and board chair David Hay of Charleston in August 2022 and December 2022 which said “the college does not support the narrowing of King Street to one lane of vehicular traffic.” Though the first letter was submitted during the public comment period, neither were initially made public.
The August letter also named King Street a “premier retail artery,” which Emerson said might have to do with Hay’s business connections to King Street. Hay did not reply to an inquiry by the City Paper.
Now, however, the administration seems to be staying out of it, according to CofC English professor Joseph Kelly. “The very strong impression that I got was that the college didn’t have a real keen interest between” the two alternatives, he said.
But Emerson said these views are not indicative of CofC’s position, unless you’re excluding thousands of faculty and students. Especially now that the “current incoming freshman class is 500” more than usual and students need 60 credit hours to park on campus, which “pushes a lot of them to be cyclists and pedestrians.”
He said there’s momentum for the bike lane on campus — hundreds of students have already signed onto a petition in support.
14-foot lane
After reopening the bike lane discussion during the summer, the city’s Traffic and Transportation Committee presented what some view as an out-of-the blue alternative: a 14-foot-wide one-way street for all traffic — which would essentially push both cyclists and cars into one larger road. Emerson spoke of the lack of transparency involved in the process: “The plan wasn’t released until basically the day of the meeting.”
On the Charleston peninsula, he said, “there’s [no road] over 11 feet [wide] … Most highways are 12 [feet].” Given traffic safety information, Emerson added, the new proposal would encourage speeding on a road that’s already struggling with this problem.
According to the Texas Transportation Institute, highway lanes that were 13 feet or wider were associated with a greater risk of crashing. Even in urban areas, the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) suggests a 10-foot lane width default.
What’s next?
Seekings didn’t mention the 14-foot lane proposal to the City Paper in a later interview. Instead, he said the plan for King Street “may include a recommendation and ultimately widening the sidewalks” first suggested by Tecklenberg when the city council convened in August.
Widening the sidewalks might be less controversial, but Emerson said it isn’t all that practical.
And it’s timely and expensive — you have to put it on the capital improvement projects list, which means a 10- to 15-year wait, Zimmerman said. This doesn’t necessarily mean she isn’t open to it, as long as the city comes up with something while the project is pending. She added, “Why don’t we go ahead and put it on the list?”
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