With year-round moderate weather and a beautiful, historic downtown surrounded by the natural beauty of the Lowcountry, Charleston should be a cyclist’s ideal place to live.
Emphasis on the word “should” for two reasons: Several thoroughfares leave cyclists unprotected from drivers, and existing bike lanes are wearing out.
“People have told me, ‘You shouldn’t be advocating for more bike lanes, because they aren’t maintained, and it’s going to be just something else that we can’t even use,’” said Katie Zimmerman, executive director of local advocacy group Charleston Moves.
“What we’ve got on the ground over the past couple of decades is mostly standard bike lanes right up against traffic,” she said. “Those tend to get overgrown or get more debris in them, or they get kind of beat up. It’s sort of rare at this point that those are even appropriate.”
Without physical barriers or separation from traffic, vehicles push road debris into bike lanes. Or worse, careless drivers veer into or even park in them. This leads to cluttered, damaged or dangerous lanes for cyclists, leaving them not much better off than they were without the lanes in the first place.
Patchwork paths lead to problems
Getting existing lanes cleaned up and repaired is more complicated than it first seems, said Ross Appell, a West Ashley member of Charleston City Council. The city can make small repairs like addressing potholes or debris clearing, but when you start getting into bigger projects like repaving, it’s a different story.
“You have to look at these on a case-by-case basis to really hammer out the fine details,” Appel said. “We help where we can, but when you’re talking about large stretches of lanes that need maintenance or repair … we have to go and ask for approval.”
From there, the city is often met with bureaucratic red tape, massive delays and a lack of funding. This is because the city seldom owns the roads in question. Instead, state-owned and managed by the S.C. Department of Transportation (DOT).
“The city would love to be able to build more and maintain more, but we just lack the tools to do it,” Appel said. “We have no dedicated revenue streams for road maintenance — that is all at the state and county levels.”
Zimmerman lamented the situation, too, adding that if it’s a state-owned road, you also have to consider what the DOT considers standard development.
“It’s just so frustrating,” she said. “The DOT owns most of the roadways, and then the county has the money, and the municipality is usually the one with the design and the need. So you have to reconcile all of that.”
Representatives from the DOT did not respond to requests for comment.
This isn’t the first time city leaders have run against this roadblock. The improvements to the Low Battery were only made possible because the city took ownership of the roads in the area. And the Ashley River Crossing project marks another major bike infrastructure win in the Charleston area. But while large projects are finding success, smaller work seems to slip through the cracks.
“Oddly enough, the same bureaucratic challenges are presented when you’re working on these small neighborhood roads as when you’re doing Meeting Street, for example,” Appel said. “So when we’re sitting around thinking of what to do, when you have to take on such a bureaucratic challenge, you’re almost incentivized to swing for these big, more impactful projects.”
Better options
Local advocates, in response to dilapidating standard bike lanes, have been pushing for more robust options.
“A lot of the stuff that’s about to go out for bid or is already under construction are more buffered bike lanes like we see on Meeting Street, for example,” Zimmerman said. “Even just these painted buffers do a lot of the job — that’s where a lot of the debris ends up landing.”
She added similar lanes were installed on Brigade Street, but as drivers parked in the bike lane or in the painted buffers, project leaders installed physical barriers, accidentally giving cyclists the first separated bike lane in Charleston.
“The bottom line is, moving forward, I just prefer we get more robust infrastructure that’s going to fill up with debris and stuff less often,” Zimmermand said. “Separated bike lanes, more off-road, mixed-use paths, these types of things block that debris from landing in the lanes and are generally safer and last longer anyway.”
She added that while pushing for new infrastructure is easy — she said she often bugs various state legislators when she sees them in public meetings — the maintenance discussion is more challenging.
“It’s going to really take a concerted lobbying effort from all of these various groups that have an interest in it — which you would think would be everybody.”
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