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Highway happiness: Residents welcome plans to widen S.C. 170

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A $24-million project to increase the number of lanes on a 5.4-mile stretch of S.C. 170 was generally well received by Bluffton and Okatie residents at a Beaufort County presentation Tuesday.

The county has said the project would decrease congestion and speed up the area's hurricane evacuation.

The widening would take the highway from two lanes to four between the S.C. 46 traffic circle and U.S. 278.

The stretch of S.C 170 from U.S. 278 north to Tide Watch Drive, at the entrance to Riverbend, would go from the existing four lanes to six lanes.

Savannah-based Thomas & Hutton, the engineering firm hired by the county to handle the project, laid out two possible maps for the expanded highway's path.

The difference between the two was the width of medians where trees would grow. The medians can be either 24 or 36 feet wide. The wider median would require 108 fewer trees to be cleared, according to the plans. The narrower median, on the other hand, would require less right of way to be purchased.

Residents at the meeting didn't appear overly concerned about the loss of tree canopy on the southern stretch south of U.S. 278.

Cliff Nickerson of Sun City, who used to commute to Savannah along the two-lane section of the road, called the canopy loss that would come with a wider road "a trade-off."

The expanded highway won't have the same shady tree-cover, he said, "but people want to be safe driving on a foggy night."

He also said that previous projects"... did a lot of ... damage already" to the tree cover.

Riverbend resident Joan Gualdoni said that while she had some concerns about increased noise along the highway, she felt the county and its engineering firm had paid attention to maintaining a rural look along the road, protecting trees and creating a bike path.

"It sounds like they're approaching this correctly," Gualdoni said.

She was not the only one at the meeting excited about a proposed, 10-foot-wide bike path, which would run from the traffic circle to the entrance to Sun City Hilton Head.

Dave Kimball, a member of East Coast Greenway, a group dedicated to creating a national bike path from Maine to Florida, called plans for the bike path "tremendous."

Near the end of the meeting, Doyle Kelley, a Thomas & Hutton engineer, said residents seemed most focused on noise concerns and the course of the bike path.

Plans show the path would begin on the west side of the widened highway, switching across the road at a traffic signal and switching back at a second signal. The early plan makes the path inaccessible from several large subdivisions along the road. Kelley indicated changes still can be made depending on residents' comments. The firm asked residents to send those comments to county engineers during a two-week period that began Tuesday and ends June 11.

Kelley said the county could begin buying land along S.C. 170 in 2009. That process could take as long as a year, he said. There was no firm date for the start of construction.

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