On Monday, Upstate Business Journal announced that a new road parallel to Woodruff Road in Greenville is in the works and that nearly 90% of the required funding for it has already been obtained. UBJ further detailed that the route will connect Verdae Blvd to Woodruff Industrial Blvd (the street in between Target and Trader Joe’s) and that officials estimate this new road will decrease Woodruff Road traffic by over 20%. Furthermore, Greenville’s director of public works believes that construction on the road will begin before the end of the year.
Happy dance, anyone?
Let’s face it – this road is extremely important and (assuming it works out) should be a major cause of celebration. Woodruff Road is no Avenue of the Americas, but the traffic issues that are prevalent on it are disproportionate to Greenville’s population. To say it another way: Greenville still hasn’t gotten “big enough” that you should have to sit thirty minutes (or more during holidays) to go one mile down the road. This is a problem that should never have happened and that needs to be corrected immediately, especially since it’s likely to only get worse if nothing is done about it.
I actually think that the statement from UBJ that this road is “expected to cut traffic on Woodruff Road by more than 20 percent” is a bit misleading. Twenty percent is a really great number, and that type of decrease will be felt immediately, but I’m more excited about the fact that this type of road would mean I would very rarely have to drive on Woodruff Road myself.
Currently, I live in Eastside Greenville, and I already have great access to the Shops at Greenridge by taking backroads from Pelham Road – Riley Smith, Roper Mountain Road, Chrome Drive, and Garlington Road. I frequently make it from my house to Greenridge in seven minutes or less, which is tremendous. East of Greenridge is never the problem – there will always be some congestion before you get past Walmart, but it’s never that bad. Ninety percent of the problem is between Greenridge and Verdae, which is exactly where this new road will be.
So I’m pretty excited about this. It’s possible that I’ll be able to get to Trader Joe’s, Costco, Palmetto State Armory, and Regal Cinemas without ever driving on Woodruff Road. And now that I know about this, it’s going to be tough to stomach that we’ll have to wait at least a year for this to happen. So in the meantime, as we sit in traffic, wondering when we’ll move up from the mesmerizing Chuy’s sign, we can dream of backroads, 20% traffic decreases, and fewer SC drivers stopping short in front of us to pull into the movies.
Glad to hear they are doing this. This is a good example of a remark I made on your Facebook: we’ll be damned if we do this project, as we’ll feel it a bit in the meantime, but we’ll be really damned if we don’t. Woodruff Rd is the only place in Greenville we’ve been that routinely reminds us of Atlanta traffic, and metro Atlanta has about 6 million residents compared to Greenville Co.’s near half million. Thankfully they are doing this asap rather than 5 years from now, when it would be near apocalypse level.