Boundary Street tickets up 60 percent over last year, wrecks doubled

Beaufort police officers have already written hundreds more tickets on Boundary Street through April of this year than during the same period last year.

Wrecks in the work zone this year are more than double the number of incidents on all of Boundary Street during the same time frame, according to data from the Beaufort Police Department.

City and project leaders say the increased ticketing is needed to maintain safety during the construction project spanning 1.2 miles of Boundary Street from Neil Road to Greenlawn Drive.

Police wrote 616 traffic tickets for various violations on all of Boundary Street this year through April 21, up from 387 on the road from the period last year, according to numbers provided by Beaufort police spokeswoman Cpl. Hope Able.

There have been 81 wrecks in the work zone during that time, up from 39 reported on all of Boundary Street during the same period last year. Those numbers include crashes in the road and on private property, Able said.

The Boundary Street citations made up more than half the 1,124 tickets police wrote in the city through April 21.

Police have written 123 speeding tickets in the work zone since Jan. 1 and issued 101 warnings. The number of speeding tickets and warnings from the same time last year was not available without scrutinizing each report, Able said Monday.

The Boundary Street tickets aren’t being written to pad city coffers, city manager Bill Prokop said, responding to some residents he said believe traffic fines are a big money-maker for the city.

Prokop defended the tickets as only a small percentage of the millions of cars on the roadway during that time.

He noted that the state gets 60 percent of the money from violators. Of the 22 speeding tickets processed by municipal court in March, for example, one received the maximum fine of $445 and the remaining tickets were for $185.63, he said. The city came away with $1,775 and the state with more than $2,500, Prokop said.

“This clearly shows that our program is about safety, not about revenue,” Prokop told City Council on April 26.

A traffic trailer was set up on Robert Smalls Parkway near Boundary Street for two weeks in April. The data showed that more than half of drivers traveled more than 40 miles per hour — 5 mph over the posted work zone speed limit.

Almost 19,000 cars per day traveled the thoroughfare one way, which works out to more than 2 million cars since the beginning of the year, according to numbers from the two-week study.

The $33-million Boundary Street project is about 20 percent complete, city project manager David Coleman said in April. The work includes realigning the intersection at Robert Smalls Parkway and Boundary Street, a redeveloped First Street parallel to Boundary, burying utility lines and building raised, landscaped medians.

Work to create a duct bank for burying utilities on the south side of the street should be completed within about two weeks,when sidewalk and gutter work on the same side will begin, Coleman said.

“We’re on schedule; we’re doing good,” he said. “The project is healthy at this point.”

Complaints from travelers have included restricted left turns and lane pileups. Traffic was restricted to one lane one morning in late April after a metal plate covering a hole in the road was dislodged.

A left-turn arrow will be added at the Kmart shopping center soon and another could be added at Hogarth Drive, though Coleman said the second arrow might not be necessary. The left turn from Boundary Street onto Robert Smalls Parkway has been reduced to one lane from two, but Coleman noted that the lane is longer and the time on the green arrow has been doubled.

Without a median, blocking left turns is the only way to keep traffic moving, he said this month.

Coleman said strictly enforcing the speed limit is necessary to keep workers or others from being killed. He said he has twice had to dodge plastic barrels after they were struck by vehicles.

“It’s not a joke,” he said.

This story was originally published April 28, 2016 at 9:27 AM with the headline "Boundary Street tickets up 60 percent over last year, wrecks doubled."