UPDATE – CALL TO ACTION

Thank you for signing our Petition. We are approaching 6300 signatures!

SCDOT’s $290 Million Corridor Plan has been released and advocates major irreversible surgery to our Island, without showing that it solves our problems.

Their plan will build a 6 lane expressway and bridges, and actually add 2 traffic lights to the 2 we already have. Thus, there will be 4 traffic lights between Moss Creek and the Cross Island Parkway.

A major problem is that SCDOT’s study area was incomplete (e.g. not extending to the Cross Island Parkway), and their methodology was inadequate, ignoring key parts, impacts, and end-end quantitative calculations. These missing parts will decrease the quality of the result, and impact safety while increasing the $290 Million cost.

I have filed extensive comments with SCDOT, showing many of the issues. Others have done the same. An Executive Summary of my comments is included at the end of this blurb. The full comments are available at the Documents section of Nextdoor at      https://nextdoor.com/documents/

We need a second opinion, especially since this project is irreversible and expensive, with major local impacts. It will also displace other better plans in the wings.

A Public Hearing will be held on July 22, 2021, but the official Public Comment period is from July 7 to August 22, 2021.

Please send a Comment, even one sentence, to SCDOT at one of the addresses below:

- Email     info@SCDOT278Corridor.com

- Online Comment Form    www.SCDOT278Corridor.com

- You may also wish to comment to the Mayor or Town Council. Their email addresses are on the following link 

      https://www.hiltonheadislandsc.gov/towncouncil/

Thank you,

Steven Baer (for many others)

steve181new@gmail.com

Executive Summary

After reviewing SCDOT’s July 7, 2021 Public Hearing materials and supporting documents including their Environmental Analysis (EA), I come to the conclusion that their presently proposed plan (4A – Recommended Preferred) is deeply flawed and built like a house of cards. The reasons for this conclusion, documented in the following sections, include:

·     The scope of SCDOT’s plan does not extend far enough to understand, address or solve our actual congestion problems.

·     SCDOT ignores a major source of our congestion problems (lights and intersections) and attempts to solve them with a capacity increase.

·     The forecasts used by SCDOT are highly questionable, and appear to be mainly designed to support a capacity increase.

·     SCDOT tries to make the case that they have listened to Citizens in their review process when the opposite is the case. This has prompted over 6200 Citizens to sign a Petition challenging the project’s direction and results.

·     SCDOT’s planning process (for a constrained scope) has A - optimized roads, then B- optimized intersections, while C – ignoring other costs, traffic, environmental, and community issues outside an artificially constrained study scope. This almost certainly will result in a sub-optimal plan. If all costs and issues (A+B+C) had been considered and optimized as a whole, a very different plan would likely have resulted.

·     SCDOT’s process and analyses seem to deal with one intersection at a time, ignoring the compound effect of multiple traffic lights, especially during busy hours. Given the fact that their plan now includes 4 traffic lights vs 2 before, it is possible that the compound effect of those lights will reduce the traffic flow to below what an alternate plan would have provided. No end-to-end analysis seems to have been performed to deal with this.

·     A method of bypassing the 2 problem traffic lights to provide a direct connection to the Cross Island Parkway for 50% or more of the traffic has been submitted in the past and is submitted once again in these comments. It is possible that a plan using 4 lanes with no lights for Express traffic is more efficient, with fewer intersection and turn issues, than SCDOT’s plan using 6 lanes with 4 lights. This is an example of why end-end analysis is required.

·     SCDOT’s plan produces large ugly intersections that trees and land planning cannot effectively hide. 

·     In an effort to solve their intersection problems, SCDOT’s plan pushes more traffic into local roads and communities. The costs and impacts of these, including the safety impacts of additional lights and complex traffic flows, are not well unaccounted for.

·     There has been no end-end quantitative comparison of the total costs, throughput, community and environmental impacts, and issues (including the missing parts outside the overly constrained study scope) of the SCDOT plans vs those suggested by Citizens. SCDOT has done limited comparisons only within its own limited set of plans – all involving 6-lanes bridges and expressways through local communities.

·     The plan for the added traffic light at Windmill Harbor (WH) – Jenkins Island appears to ignore the recommendations of SCDOT’s traffic consultant. There are other ways to solve this problem as shown in the following comments.

Many of these issues have been known, documented, and communicated to SCDOT over the past several years, but have been consistently ignored.

These comments just scratch the surface. The issues brought up need to be reviewed by independent engineers whose business is not dependent on State contracts.

It is recommended that the current proposed plan be rejected and that a major University or independent consulting firm be retained to provide plans to solve the properly scoped Hilton Head congestion problem. If this is not done, we will have missed opportunities and wasted money on a sub-optimal plan, that almost certainly comes with additional costs and issues just around the corner.

Finally, several Professional Engineers (PE) have, or are about to sign off on the current SCDOT plan. This lends validity to the plan far beyond what it deserves, given its many issues. In keeping with the PE Code of Ethics, it is imperative that these Professional Engineers include a Disclaimer stating plan caveats so that the Public, Town, and County Councils, as well as State and Federal approving and funding organizations, may fully understand the limitations of the plan. It would be unethical if the shortcomings of the plan were in any way glossed over or hidden from these groups by a PE badge of authority.