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Mount Pleasant expands scope of Highway 17 study
Consultant to submit report by the end of May
By Matthew French
Staff Writer
A month after an East Cooper citizen’s group began to make noise by reproving plans to create overpasses along Highway 17 in Mount Pleasant, the town has included the group’s alternate plans in the scope of a study being conducted by an Atlanta-based consultant.
The East Cooper Planning Council, comprised of residents and businesspeople from Mount Pleasant, Isle of Palms, Sullivan’s Island, Daniel Island and Cainhoy, first met a year ago with 33 people interested in helping shape the future of growth east of the Cooper River. Its first public action was to counter the town’s plans with a proposal of its own to create rotaries, or roundabouts, at three of the most congested intersections between the Mark Clark Expressway and the Cooper River bridge.
By most accounts Highway 17 in Mount Pleasant will be bursting at the seams in a few short years. The roadway, a highway with two lanes in each direction, currently handles about 40,000 cars per day.
That number is expected to jump to between 60,000 and 70,000 in the next 15 years. How that traffic will be handled will be the subject of debate for the next several years.
One proposal, which the East Cooper Planning Council opposes, involves the creation of flyovers, or overpasses, at major intersections along Highway 17, including at Houston Northcutt Boulevard and Bowman Road. The group surmises that the overpasses will be an aesthetic blight on the community as well as a detriment to businesses located along the corridor.
Town officials counter that claim, saying they’re looking closely at all options before determining the next course of action.
“The one thing the East Cooper Council has done is get people involved and that is a good thing,” says Mac Burdette, town manager for Mount Pleasant. “However, they are not very accurate in everything the say. But there is nothing we can do about that.”
The citizens group has successfully generated enough response from the population in Mount Pleasant to convince Town Council to authorize an extra $60,000 to pay the Atlanta consulting firm to consider alternatives to the flyovers in its report.
Burdette says the report should be back to the town soon and the first information made public by the end of May or beginning of June, with the first signs of construction starting next summer.
“We’d love to see Johnnie Dodds as a main street environment,” Burdette says. “The problem is that it handles three levels of traffic.”
He says the cars driving Highways 17 and Johnnie Dodds Boulevard includes local traffic going to stores and businesses, intra-city traffic and commuters and passers-through.
“Some of that is going to change,” he says. “But the fact remains that it is the only route from Mount Pleasant to downtown Charleston. Do you think that people are going to take 526 (the Mark Clark Expressway) and loop around to (Interstate) 26 to get there?”
Because Charleston County, and not the town, actually manages all transportation projects, Burdette says he wants to make sure the county has the input from the town before any project begins.
“Our question is when do we give them our input,” he asks. “We want to make sure that we get our input so our concerns become their concerns.”
He says that $20 million of the money will be available upfront and the town is looking at fixing the Mark Clark intersection as the first project. Other sections would then follow, but that work is still years away.
Another concern he has is with the cost of the project. $120 million was the estimate two years ago. Any delay could cause the cost to rise and “we have to be concerned about that.”
The Johnnie Dodds section of Highway 17 isn’t the only part of the road that’s reaching its maximum capacity. The section from the Mark Clark Expressway north to the Isle of Palms connector is already slated for widening, which will begin this spring. That construction project is scheduled to last about a year and a half.
“It will be painful at times,” Mount Pleasant Mayor Harry Hallman said in his State of the Town address in February. “Of our citizens, we ask that you help each other during this construction period.”
Matthew French covers engineering and governmental policy for the Business Journal. E-mail him at mfrench@crbj.com.
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