"There have been four wrecks already tonight on the bridge," said Paula as she checked us out at the Food Lion.
I can easily believe that.
Folks down in Charleston are going on about a bridge they’re about to open down there, but what’s the big deal? It will basically do what the old one did — get you from one side of the Cooper River to the other, and in basically the same way… with the addition of a pedestrian-biking lane, of course.
Whereas the big news in my neck of the Midlands is the new bridge that takes you across Interstate 26 via Sunset Boulevard. Some might call it an overpass, but it’s like none we’ve seen in these parts. (Actually, I think maybe I’ve seen some other interchanges that approach it around town — out beyond Harbison, and over at the intersection of Forest Drive and 77 — but the wild thing about this one is that it’s not a new interchange at all; this was built over the course of several years to replace an old bridge without ever completely interrupting the traffic to do it.)
In the several years it has taken to build it, this thing has been a constant source of puzzlement to those of us who traverse it regularly. We understood the need for the project — the old four-laner choked up every morning with the endless flow of a gazillion SUVs flowing toward Columbia, disgorged from the new subdivisions that keep popping up like weeds around the town of Lexington. They’d come piling in and backing up right at the point where I would have to turn onto 378, and getting that first mile to I-26 would take as long as driving the rest of the way to the office. It was extremely frustrating, especially when I was trying to get kids to North Side Middle School or Brookland-Cayce on time on my way to work.
So men with gigantic riding power tools started to work, and they tore down, and they built up, and they redirected the flow of the mighty river of steel and carbon monoxide. They concocted new ramps, and reshaped surrounding access roads. Businesses withered and fell before the changes, and others grew in their places. A Waffle House inexplicably was torn down, then rebuilt — although with the building oriented slightly differently, I believe — right in the midst of it all. And once we got used to one configuration, the busy men got busy again and changed it one more time, creating some really wild patterns in which you took your life in your hands getting on and off the Interstate across access road traffic. And if you were on one of the access roads and failed to crane your neck 270 degrees and keep it there while you accelerated from a new (albeit temporary) stop sign, you ran the risk of someone coming off the freeway westbound at 60 mph, BAM! into your left rear quarterpanel.
While we were all distracted with that, the construction crews built a new bridge right next to the old one, and redirected the overpass traffic onto the new lanes. Then they tore down the old bridge. OK. Then they started building another new bridge in its place. (Surely they’re not going to tear down the first new one, now, are they?)
Then, suddenly, all was unveiled. With no ceremony beyond some shifting of orange plastic barrels first into one configuration, then another, the whole thing (almost) was opened to traffic starting early Saturday morning. All of a sudden, we had an 11-lane overpass. Well, OK, maybe there aren’t 11 parallel lanes at any one point on the bridge (or maybe there are — not having an aerial photo in hand to refer to as I write this, it’s a little hard to visualize it all at once), but there are five lanes going each way, and one in the middle that apparently exists to show they had could have made it even wider if they’d wanted to. Of the five lanes each way, one is a right turn lane that doesn’t require stopping at the light; two go straight across to continue on 378, and two others turn left onto the Interstate (although once on the ramp, you have to merge back to one lane).
There is one row of traffic lights, at the very center of the span, instead of the set at either end that we had when all this started. That, and every other feature of the bridge, exists to keep things moving. And it looks like it might work, if everybody can figure it out. One of the smartest innovations — and the most disorienting one — is the way both eastbound and westbound traffic exiting the Interstate can turn left onto Sunset simultaneously, without having to cross each others’ paths. This is accomplished by briefly transporting all motorists to Merrie England, where you drive to the left of opposing traffic, and watch it all go whizzing past you on your right.
This is extremely efficient, and most unsettling — all the more so because the project isn’t, well, what you’d actually call finished. As Paula at Food Lion put it, "The lights are right, but the lines are wrong." Actually, it’s more complicated than that. The final layer of asphalt isn’t down (at least I hope not — this thing is still very rough and uneven). The big plastic barrels block off some portions of the bridge — for instance, only one of the two left-turn lanes each way is actually functioning (even though there are two left turn lights working, which can give you the erroneous impression that one of the go-straight lanes is a left-turn channel — hence Paula’s observation).
People are really confused, particularly the Interstate-bound traffic that goes onto the access roads that until Saturday were the way onto the freeway, but no longer. This leads to much turning around and doubling back. I have noticed no signs saying "This is no longer the way!" The engineers are evidently letting people figure it out by trial and error. It’s sort of like they’re just trying it all out this way to see how we handle it, before deciding whether to tear it all up and try yet another approach. It’s like they just can’t bring themselves to put down that last sheet of macadam and call it a completed project.
All of this has led in the last few days to the most excitement we’ve had in my general neighborhood in quite some time. OK, so I don’t get out much. But for a guy who basically gets up in the morning and goes to work, and then drags back home and plops into bed, this is high adventure.
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