Hilton Head’s tourist traffic rush is past its peak. How many cars crammed onto the island this summer?

For locals heading home for the evening and tourists coming for a week, summer on Hilton Head Island often involves hours of inching across U.S. 278. alongside thousands of visitors. The congestion issue has lingered for years, but is tourist traffic increasing to make bumper-to-bumper jams worse?

With summer in the rear view mirror, completed state data reveals that, while 2023 was the busiest peak season post-pandemic, the bridge wasn’t quite as crowded as some years prior. The trend has crept upward over the years, according to traffic count data from the South Carolina Department of Transportation, but has plateaued recently.

From May 1 to Aug. 31 this year, an average of 30,400 cars crossed the bridge daily onto Hilton Head Island, which has around 40,000 total residents. Understanding the numbers can be daunting, but it’s easier to visualize — if one day’s worth of cars were lined up end-to-end, the line of vehicles would extend back and forth from the tip of South Beach to Pine Island Beach in the north more than seven times.

Daily traffic onto Hilton Head reached its highest point this summer on June 30, when 35,898 vehicles total crossed the bridge eastbound.

The summer daily average for 2023 was only a marginal increase to the year prior. In the summer of 2022, Hilton Head averaged 30,351 cars coming east onto the island every day.

Summer traffic averages have yet to climb back to their pre-pandemic peak — which was a daily average of 30,959 cars crossing onto Hilton Head from May to August 2019 — but the overall trend has ticked back up after a 2020 dip, returning to the slow growth the numbers have displayed from SCDOT’s earliest data in 2010.

Since 2010, annual traffic averages have risen from 52,200 each day to last year’s daily average of 57,400. SCDOT tracks its annual averages using a count of vehicles moving in both directions across the bridge.

Adapting to more traffic

The increasing travel along U.S. 278 has necessitated a revamp of the highway and the bridges connecting Hilton Head. State, county and town officials have worked through the 278 Corridor Project to replace the bridges, declared structurally deficient by state authorities, with a wider six-lane span and introduce new adaptive traffic signal systems to ease congestion.

The plan may promise to solve traffic woes in the future, but some residents have expressed dread for the impact ongoing construction, particularly near the bridge, could have for short-term traffic when the project begins breaking ground in earnest. Even without active construction, some off-island business owners who service Hilton Head customers have become hesitant to send their employees to the island for fear they may spend more time sitting in traffic than anything else.

The Town of Hilton Head Island and Beaufort County launched a study of the 278 corridor earlier this year to review the current project, with those results expected to be finalized this month. The town is in the process of hiring another firm to conduct its own, independent review, which has frustrated members of the Greater Island Council, who claim the town lacks a “sense of urgency” to move the project forward.

There isn’t currently a set date for when construction on the new bridge could begin.

This story was originally published September 12, 2023 at 4:05 PM.

Blake Douglas

The Island Packet

Blake is the Hilton Head Island reporter for the Island Packet. A Tulsa, Oklahoma native, Blake has written for his hometown Tulsa World, as well as the Charlotte Observer. He graduated in May 2022 from the University of Oklahoma with a journalism degree.