At first, it looked like a contradiction.
On Thursday morning, a new national report ranked South Carolina’s highway system third best in the nation. And just a few hours later, the S.C. Senate passed a sweeping highway reform bill aimed at overhauling the way state roads are built and maintained.
But Baruch Feigenbaum, senior managing director of transportation policy at the libertarian-leaning Reason Foundation and the report’s primary author, said the actions weren’t as contradictory as they seemed.
“Where the state excels is that its spending is very low,” Feigenbaum told Statehouse Report. “But some of the other things, like fatality rates and road conditions aren’t so good. So even though the state ranks highly overall, it’s more of a mixed story.”
Put simply, the Reason study attempts to balance low costs and good outcomes. It shows S.C.’s roads spending is so low that it essentially skews the results.
How low is it? About $200 per person, per year, according to data from the S.C. Alliance to Fix Our Roads. And that’s just not enough to maintain an unusually large state highway system — the fourth largest in the country at 41,000 miles — and keep the traffic moving in a state that’s adding more than 200 new residents every day, experts say.
“If your roads aren’t smooth, if you’ve got potholes and traffic congestion, that’s a problem,” Feigenbaum said. “Taxpayers like to see low spending, but they’d also like to see better system quality.”
Reforming the system
Berkeley County Republican Sen. Larry Grooms, chairman of the Senate Transportation Committee and author of the highway bill that passed 37-1, told Statehouse Report that the legislation was written to address both sides of the cost problem, with new sources of money and reforms designed to make those dollars go further.
On the reform side, Grooms points to language that would force better coordination of roads projects across state agencies and require the S.C. Department of Transportation (SCDOT) to create a long-range state transportation plan.
In addition, the bill would authorize SCDOT to enter into an agreement with the federal government to manage the environmental permitting process for new roads — an approach that’s been shown to lower costs and speed up projects in states like Texas and California. And at the local level, the bill also would incentivize counties and cities to take ownership of non-critical state roads — and set hard deadlines for them to give their consent for new state roads projects.
On the money side, the bill would expand the SCDOT’s tolling authority, as well as authorize it to enter into public-private partnerships to build what are called “choice lanes” — a move that Grooms said was essential to get expensive projects moving in some of the state’s most congested regions.
Under a choice lanes system, such as the one used to finance Georgia’s Highway 400, tolled express lanes are added to congested highways, with private investors providing capital in exchange for the toll. In practice, Grooms noted, choice lanes wind up easing traffic not only for those choosing to pay the toll, but for the remaining cars in the still-free lanes as well.
“For me, that’s the heart of the bill,” Grooms said, noting that long-planned road widening projects in the Lowcountry like I-26 and I-526 are still on the drawing boards because they would eat up all available state funding.
“The only way those lane widenings are going to happen in the next quarter century is with choice lanes,” he said.
Grooms’s Democratic cosponsor, Charleston Sen. Ed Sutton, lauded not just the bill, but what he described as the thoughtful, bipartisan process that produced it.
“We had a lot of good discussions in committee, with a lot of good ideas, including from industry experts,” Sutton said. “And it was all very refreshing, in that Democrats played as much of a leading role on it as Republicans.”
What’s more, Sutton said, the committee is already prepared to move forward with additional reforms, once the current legislation is reconciled with a similar bill that’s making its way through the House.
“This will be the first of several efforts,” Sutton said. “It’s a massive step forward when it comes to modernizing SCDOT, but there’s more to do — and hopefully, we’ll be able to push forward and get that conversation going before this session is over.”
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