Transportation Reform in South Carolina

To end years of government waste and environmental destruction, SELC helped South Carolina legislators craft a landmark law that reforms the way transportation projects are selected in the state. Now we are working with state officials to implement the law, which should result in fewer proposals for costly “pork barrel” highway projects that threaten the state’s ecological riches.

Holding SCDOT to Higher Standards

Enacted in 2007, less than a year after a legislative audit found that the South Carolina Department of Transportation had wasted millions of dollars and mis-represented its finances to the public and legislature, the reform law compels the agency to:

• Select projects based on objective analysis of real transportation need rather than political pressure
• Factor into the selection process the cost, safety, and potential impacts to air, water and natural areas
• Consider less destructive alternatives to new highways and bridges, including improvements to existing road networks, transit projects, and bike and pedestrian routes
• Ensure full public participation in major transportation decisions; and
• Develop a long-range transportation plan that looks beyond building more and bigger highways

Challenging the Most Destructive Projects

As we strive to end years of wasteful spending on unnecessary highways, we continue to fight ill-conceived projects that would subject South Carolinians to more traffic, pollution, and sprawl.

For example, we are challenging a proposed shipping-container terminal and connecting highway at the Port of Charleston. The expansion would rely on trucks rather than trains to move cargo, adding up to 10,000 vehicle trips a day to the local road system. Also in the Charleston area, we are advocating innovative alternatives to the outdated proposal to add seven miles to the Mark Clark Expressway (I-526), which would destroy wetland habitat, further impair the Stono River, and usher sprawl onto Johns Island. A better solution would be to improve connections within the current road system to route local traffic away from congested throughways.

On the northern coast, we are defending natural areas around Winyah Bay and the Waccamaw River from highway projects that would open the way to more sprawl emanating from Myrtle Beach. For a proposed portion of Interstate 73 that would destroy hundreds of acres of wetlands and fragment other ecosystems, we are opposing SCDOT’s preferred route, which fails to maximize use of existing highway corridors. We are also opposing a nearby project, the 701 Connector (aka, the Southern Evacuation Life-Line, or “SELL”), touted as a hurricane evacuation route, that would bisect the Waccamaw National Wildlife Refuge. By opening hundreds of thousands of acres to development, the project would fuel rampant growth, which would soon overwhelm its capacity to handle traffic in weather emergencies.

In all our South Carolina transportation work, we are pointing the way toward a future that strengthens communities, reduces air and water pollution, protects sensitive ecosystems, and decreases global warming emissions.