County considering dropping from 4 to 2 lanes between Ribaut Road, Bellamy curve
By Delayna Earley
The Island News
Beaufort County proposed a six-month “road diet” for a stretch of Boundary Street during the City of Beaufort’s work session on Tuesday, Jan. 23, but city council members requested more information and data before they could endorse the study.
According to the U.S. Department of Transportation’s website, a road diet, or roadway reconfiguration, typically means converting an existing four-lane roadway into a three-lane roadway with two dedicated through lanes and one center turn lane.
According to the presentation made on Tuesday, Beaufort County hopes to temporarily shrink Boundary Street from Ribaut Road to Bellamy Curve by re-striping the road.
If the project goes forward, the four-lane road would be reduced to two dedicated 12-foot-wide through lanes and one 15-foot center turning lane.
Both sides of the road would have 2.5-foot-wide buffers between the sidewalk and traffic.
Brittanee Bishop, a program and finance manager in Beaufort County’s Engineering Department, was on hand to answer questions about the reasoning behind this project.
Among the reasons for the project is the hope that this change will reduce traffic and improve safety for University of South Carolina Beaufort (USC Beaufort) students who walk from student housing on Boundary Street to the main campus on Carteret Street.
Several concerned citizens made comments during the public comment period and said that they do not believe that this is truly about keeping USC Beaufort students safe.
Several Beaufort residents also took issue with the county’s assertion that the two middle lanes are only used as turning lanes, saying that traffic travels on all four lanes regularly and they worried about how this was going to affect their ability to get in and out of their neighborhood easily.
According to Beaufort resident Dan Blackman, he said he has not seen an issue there, so he sees no need to analyze it.
The road diet, according to Bishop, is a pilot program and would only last six months.
They do not plan to alter any existing infrastructure, just re-striping the road to make it two lanes.
Bishop said that they plan to study traffic patterns in the area for six months to compare it to other areas of Beaufort and to see if there are improvements.
Another reason that the county wants to do this pilot program is to “validate assumptions made on the Ribaut Road project and determine how changing traffic flow may impact final designs of the Reimagine Ribaut Road Project.”
Bishop said that Beaufort County will not proceed with the pilot project without the City of Beaufort’s blessing.
The road diet project, if given the green light to proceed, will be funded by Beaufort County.
Delayna Earley formerly worked as a photojournalist for The Island Packet/The Beaufort Gazette, as well as newspapers in Indiana and Virginia. She can be reached at delayna.theislandnews@gmail.com.
