Eric Connor

econnor@greenvillenews.com

The pace of improvement along Woodruff Road appears about as brisk as the traffic that doesn't move on it during the holidays — but, piece by piece, efforts are being made with both long and short-range goals in mind.

By the end of the year, the first of those efforts — a new road connecting Woodruff Industrial Lane to Verdae Boulevard — could offer some relief.

The problem has been years in the making and is interconnected with the growth of Greenville beyond the infamous, gridlocked commercial corridor.

It extends to interstates 85 and 385, where the second-largest road project ever in the state of South Carolina promises to provide significant relief to Woodruff Road. It involves the major retail shopping centers, which in the early days of Woodruff's unplaned development explosion weren't designed to be interconnected. And, nearby, the large-scale vision to turn Verdae Boulevard into the lifeline of a new, major city sector demands a solution.

The $55 million Woodruff Road parallel bypass is the game-changer, but it's no sooner than five years from beginning, and the impact of the state's current dramatic interchange project on Woodruff traffic is still off in the distance.

But in the meantime, the near-term fix is a new, $3.7 million project that will link a collection of dead-end streets to create a small bypass of Woodruff Road to Verdae Boulevard.

The private sector is contributing the majority of the funding, about $2.1 million in money and land to link Woodruff Industrial Lane behind the Target superstore to Green Heron Road and Ketron Court to Verdae.

The government will chip in $1.2 million, split three ways between the city, county and state road funds controlled locally.

The city hopes to get the remaining $400,000 from other businesses along Woodruff Road, City Engineer Dwayne Cooper said. They already have $200,000 committed.

"We're talking to a lot of different folks to make it happen," Cooper said.

Mayor Knox White said he wants to see the connector completed before Christmas, a wish that Cooper said is difficult but not impossible because of the local nature of the partnership and funding.

The first spark of the idea of a smaller-scale connector emerged after the defeat of the penny sales tax for roads in November 2014, said Hank McCullough, senior manager of intergovernmental relations for Piedmont Natural Gas Co.

The big Woodruff parallel bypass was one of the top-level items to sell the tax to voters, which was soundly defeated in the county but had a reasonable chance of passing if it applied only to the city.

The gas company has had an operations facility on Woodruff Industrial behind the Target store since the mid-1980s and didn't expect to be in its current gridlocked predicament, McCollough said.

The company told the city that it wanted to extend a private roadway to Verdae so its crews could freely respond to calls, and the city indicated it wanted to be involved, first in managing the project then in committing funds, McCollugh said.

"We have only one way in and one way out, and that presents an issue for us when we have to get trucks out in a hurry," he said. "It's not a fix-all, but it's a step in the right direction."

Piedmont and Verdae Properties have committed to spend $1.6 million. Verdae also pledged $500,000 of property it owns in the path of the proposed road.

The connector would be two lanes and would provide direct access from Verdae Boulevard to key destinations like Magnolia Park and Costco by virtue of only crossing Woodruff Road, which Cooper said suffers one of the highest accident rates in Greenville County. Traffic on the new route would be managed by two roundabouts.

“It’s going to be a basic two-lane connector," Cooper said. "Then in the future we can add on."

The city expects the connector could cut traffic on Woodruff Road by 20 percent.

The reduction in traffic would be a welcome improvement to businesses and drivers.

Maigen Taylor, a stylist at the Great Clips across from Target, counts as both.

The workers at Great Clips don't bother traveling anywhere during their 30-minute lunch break, Taylor said, because "by the time we get out, it's time to come back, just because of the traffic."

The city has already done work to keep cars off Woodruff Road. Last summer, the city spent $300,000 to move a sewer line and pave a two-lane road connecting Market Point Drive and Carolina Point Parkway, which, among other things, creates more flexibility for motorists to enter the Shops at Greenridge.

The work set to be done on the new connector to Verdae isn't the only effort under way.

The city is also preparing a major sidewalk project along Woodruff Road that will bring with it a system to prevent left turns at one of the most-perilous sections of the road.

The project, expected to begin this summer, involves installing sidewalks to extend from where they exist at the Shops at Greenridge on to Roper Mountain Road, Cooper said.

While doing that work, the city will install a concrete barrier on Woodruff Road from I-85 to Woodruff Industrial that will prevent left-hand turns into the shopping center that includes Trader Joe's and Academy Sports.

The city already puts up temporary barriers during the holidays to prevent left turns along the same stretch but will now make that system permanent.

The area is particularly dangerous, Cooper said, as people trying to turn left into Trader Joe's rely on drivers in two lanes of traffic on Woodruff to hold and let them turn. But what often happens, he said, is that drivers don't account for a third lane that is bound for the I-85 on-ramp to Atlanta.

The turn is fine when traffic is light, but the cars speeding by in the third lane during congested times is dangerous, he said.

"That's where we're experiencing very high crash rates," he said.

The city has been working with private property owners to allow for connections in parking lots between shopping centers that weren't required when projects were developed as the explosion of growth outpaced government guidelines to manage the change.

The larger-scale Woodruff Road bypass is still years away.

An environmental study will take more than a year, after which an exact route will be chosen, and funding doesn't kick in until 2021, with more funding needed in 2022, Cooper said.

Absent the bypass, the future of Woodruff Road turns to work the state Department of Transportation is doing on the interstates, which includes a dramatic re-arrangement of how traffic flows at the interchanges, including Woodruff.

The change will include towering flyover bridges, which can be seen in the large columns emerging from the ground and the first bridge deck being poured for the Woodruff on-ramp to I-385 next to the Sam's Club.

The flyovers, among 11 total being worked on, will allow motorists to bypass the current weaving among traffic trying to enter or exit at another connection — such as how traffic on I-385 from Woodruff heading north must merge in and out with cars trying to get on to I-85 to Spartanburg.

"When you ride down the road and you come into this interchange, I envision you'll be like, 'Oh, my God, this is what I've seen in Atlanta or somewhere big," said Jack Valetti, a DOT engineer who is overseeing the $231 million project.

When it began last year, the project to transform the interchange and widen the interstates to relieve congestion was the second-largest since the state built the Ravenel Bridge over the Cooper River in Charleston.

Bigger now is the $436 million effort to widen I-85 on a 26-mile stretch in Spartanburg to the North Carolina state line in Cherokee County, Valetti said.

Ultimately, the 85/385 project will result in an "adaptive" traffic signal system on Woodruff Road over the 4-mile stretch from the Costo at Ketron Court to State 14, Valetti said. The system records information and allows the signals to adjust to traffic needs on the spot.

"All those signals are going to be reconfigured with an adaptive transportation system — which is the cute word for they're going to be all tied together and communicate with one another," he said.

The intersections on Woodruff from I-385 to Greenridge will be redesigned, creating better flow and more turn lanes.

Also, in August, the DOT will re-open the Salters Road bridge that it has been working on that serves as another connection point with Woodruff Road and CU-ICAR, Cooper said.

The interchange project will help in other areas, too, particularly at rush hour, Valetti said.

I-385 will be widened with three lanes on either side from Bridges Road to downtown Greenville. I-85 will be widened to four lanes in each direction from the interchange to Pelham Road.

The Pelham Road area will include the crucial step of eliminating the afternoon rush hour bottleneck that happens when a right lane ends just before the Pelham exit, Valetti said. That fix will come toward the end of the project in 2019, later in the process because of construction staging, he said.

The interstates' connection with the interchange will include lanes separate from traffic not entering and exiting, known as "collector-distributor lanes."

The interstate project is on schedule for completion in May 2019.

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