Stuck on Beaufort’s Woods Memorial Bridge again? This app lets you avoid the hassle
We’ve all been there. Stuck on the Woods Memorial Bridge as it opens to allow boats on the Intracoastal Waterway to pass through. Well, a Lady’s Island man has come up with an app he says is helping the public navigate this hassle that’s part of daily life in Beaufort.
It’s called TheBridge APPS. It’s a free iPhone and Android app that sends a push notification the moment the bridge opens for a boat, so people can decide whether to keep driving or go over the McTeer Bridge in Port Royal instead.
The app was developed by Alex Holroyde. Like many people who live on Lady’s Island, he’s spent enough time stuck waiting on the Woods bridge and decided to make a solution.
“I built it because I was tired of getting stuck, and figured if I needed it, my neighbors probably did too,” Holroyde said.
The app has grown more than Holroyde expected — over 4,400 people in Beaufort are using it since its January launch, mostly Lady’s Island and downtown commuters. It’s kept up by a handful of local Beaufort businesses that sponsor it. “Stuck on the bridge? Don’t get stuck with bad plumbing,” one of the app ads says.
With boat traffic picking up as the summer season kicks into high gear, the new app is seeing a resurgence of interest.
To Holroyde, the app is a side hobby, not a national effort. “I more so wanted a simple solution for a local problem,” he said.
The app is also catching on outside of Beaufort. A man in Charleston was trying to do something similar. Holroyde partnered with him to develop a bridge app for the three bridges in Charleston. It had 800 downloads in a week.
Unscheduled bridge openings
Holroyde, 38, is a Cincinnati native who moved to Beaufort in 2010 to work for Young Life in Beaufort, a ministry and mentorship for high school students. He lives a mile and a half from the bridge and loves it.
Woods Memorial, a rare “swing bridge,” connects downtown Beaufort to Lady’s Island across the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway. Instead of lifting vertically like a drawbridge, its center span pivots horizontally on a central pier to let boats pass.
During the day it has scheduled times, on the hour, when it will open if there is boat traffic. That schedule is included on the app. Some 16,000 vehicles cross it every day and when it closes, cars are forced to wait several minutes or head a few miles south to the McTeer Bridge in Port Royal.
Holroyde doesn’t even mind getting stuck on the bridge because the views are marvelous. Well, at least most of the time. It is the unscheduled bridge openings, which are allowed for barges and tug boats, that can be the most disrupting, he said. They always seem to come when you are trying to pick up the kids or get to a meeting downtown, he added. The app lets people know about these unscheduled openings as well.
Holroyde relied on AI to write the code for the bridge monitoring software. The software monitors public video feeds -- like Beaufort County’s camera system -- to detect bridge openings. It also incorporates information from the public using the bridge, similar to Waze, the community-driven navigation app that relies on “crowdsourcing” to share real-time data.
App could help emergency responders
Holroyde has applied for an encroachment permit from the South Carolina Department of Transortation to attach a device on the bridge gate arms that can detect tilt. This device, he said, would be a game changer for emergency responders and everybody else because it would improve alerts by about 2 minutes, he said.
The app also is bridging the community together, Holroyde says. The app has a calendar that list community events and resources and other information like tides and weather.
