Editorial: A better bridge in North Charleston should set an example
Editorial Staff — Post & Courier
For decades, planning efforts across the Charleston region have emphasized a need to diversify our transportation modes — planner speak for the ways we get around town — and they've increasingly emphasized a need to promote more walkable, bikeable streets. Why would people consider walking or biking somewhere if they don't feel safe?
But adding better sidewalks, bike lanes and multiuse paths has faced a chicken-and-egg type political problem. Since many of us have not believed that walking or biking is a safe way to get around, relatively few of us have done that, leading politicians to (wrongly) conclude there's little demand for it. Meanwhile, progress toward making our streets safer has been lamentably slow for another reason: our geography. We have many rivers, and many bridges over them that were built in an era when our transportation planning considered cars first, second and third.
That's why bridges are such an important part of creating change.
Twenty years ago, we saw the dramatic success of the 10-foot-wide bike-ped lane on the Arthur Ravenel Bridge, and later the restriping of the Isle of Palms connector. And there have been sort of half wins, such as the newer Ben Sawyer Bridge, which was built with a wider raised sidewalk than its predecessor but one still relatively narrow and dangerous for children to cross. Charleston County's current project to widen Main Road from West Ashley to Johns Island lopped off a planned bike-ped accommodation before County Council wisely reversed course and found a way to restore it.
But the new Cosgrove Avenue extension bridge that opened last week is the most robust design for bike-ped access that we’ve seen built here to date, and we hope governments planning new bridge projects, particularly the S.C. Department of Transportation, take note. Its 12-foot multiuse path, separated from the road by a barrier, allows for residents to ride bikes or walk to the nearby Riverfront Park and other locations, and while the Navy Yard redevelopment remains in a nascent stage, there are already people using it in the middle of the afternoon on weekdays.
The project has mixed parenthood: It was begun by Palmetto Railways as part of its effort to build the Navy Base Intermodal Facility on the former Charleston Naval Base, near the Hugh Leatherman Terminal; a new bridge was needed to ensure traffic from Rivers and Cosgrove avenues could easily pass over the new rail lines and access Riverfront Park and the rest of the redevelopment going on at the northern end of the base. The State Ports Authority then took over the project, but the public input from nearby neighborhoods and North Charleston officials already had led to a design concept with an ample bike and ped lane.
Katie Zimmerman of Charleston Moves called the Cosgrove extension “the most robust design we’ve seen for bike-ped,” with the exception of the Ashley River Crossing now under construction along U.S. Highway 17. “It could have been easily dismissed as far as bike-ped connectivity goes, but they chose not to.”
The Cosgrove extension will go a long way toward creating a safe bike-ped route through the northern Naval Base to the relatively new Ray Anderson Bridge over Noisette Creek. To the east, we remain hopeful local and state governments soon will settle on a plan for a safe bike-ped crossing of the Ashley River at the North Bridge.
Bridge crossings are by far the most complicated and costly pieces of creating a safer, better connected community, so when the opportunity arises to build a new one, we should work hard to get it right — and respect what our planning efforts have been telling us to do.
