The problem is with the folks following the red line — exiting I-26 coming from Charleston, and heading west on 378 toward Lexington. They completely block traffic on 378, for light cycle after light cycle.
Here’s some hyper-ultra-local for you… It will be relevant to anyone who lives in Lexington and has to drive into Columbia on a regular basis.
I’m puzzled by a phenomenon that has just cropped up in the last couple of weeks. I’m puzzled a) that it’s happening now and b) that it never happened before (to my knowledge; maybe I was just lucky before). File this under “the stupidity of crowds,” or something like that.
The interchange at Interstate 26 and Sunset/378 in West Columbia is… unusual. It opened for business about a decade ago after years of work. Replacing a conventional older interchange that was frequently the cause of a lot of traffic backing up toward Lexington, it was at first a bit confusing, but as locals caught on, it helped things flow much more smoothly. Occasionally, there’s somebody from out of town who misreads it, but mostly it’s worked pretty well.
Until just a couple of weeks ago.
Now, all of a sudden, if I’m heading home from downtown anywhere near rush hour, traffic will be backed up a mile or two on Sunset, starting at about Hummingbird or sooner. I mean standing still for long periods of time. Yeah, I know — rush hour is rush hour. But it didn’t get bad until a couple of weeks ago, and I can’t figure out why.
I mean, I know what’s happening, because it’s easy to see when you finally get to the interchange: People getting off I-26 coming from the direction of Charleston, and trying to go west on 378 toward Lexington, are going ahead and turning when the intersection isn’t clear, and forming a line completely blocking 378. So people on 378 trying to go in either direction are completely blocked, sometimes for light cycle after light cycle.
I just don’t see why people started doing this all of a sudden, after not doing it for years. But they did, and it’s a huge pain.
Below is a shot of what it looked like at 2:22 p.m. yesterday. I was heading toward Columbia on 378 after having gone home for lunch. I had the green light, but we were going nowhere because all these people from the Interstate were blocking us.
Note that this wasn’t even at rush hour.
I just don’t get it. Why is this happening now?
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I feel your pain.
Whenever I have to drive to Lexington for court, I budget 1 hour, meaning if I have a hearing in Lexington scheduled for 10:30AM, I walk out of my office door at 9:30AM.
Keep in mind, I’m merely traveling from Shandon to downtown Lexington, which is about 15 miles.
I’ve tried 378, I’ve tried US-1, I’ve even tried I-20. No matter what, it always takes me about 45 minutes to get there, so I’m fifteen minutes early for my hearing, which is exactly when I need to be there. What makes the drive so bad is that it’s all stop-and-go traffic. It’s so much worse than driving to, say Camden, which is…just pleasant, easy driving.
I used to have decent luck on Route One–take Blossom over to Cayce and then over 9th to Jarvis Klapman–but that was before Blossom became a parking lot at certain times due to USC’s growth and the Bull Street parking garage in particular.
I thought it was only 10 miles to Lex Courthouse, but…
Not sure why the snafu has picked up suddenly in recent weeks there, but “blocking the box” is something I see increasingly all over town as our population swells (especially students). My sense is that most of these people are “first-generation-heavy-traffic” drivers, i.e., they grew up driving in a situation that was generally not as urban/crowded as the SC cities like Columbia are rapidly becoming, and so they just don’t have the experience/wisdom to drive sensibly in that context, as in not blocking the box. Main and Blossom at rush hour is a joke in that regard. If the police would slap some $250 fines on people for blocking intersections, that would get their attention in a hurry.
Oh yeah. The intersection of Main and Blossom is horrible. It backs Blossom up all the way to Five Points.
Yup. Often getting out on Blossom from Henderson is a nonstarter unless I do a NY cabbie turn…edging, nudging out, or go down to Barnwell and wait a few minutes for the light to change–just to get out, and then sit, if I am going west. Turning from Greene onto Pickens is a nightmare, too. Not sure if I am meant to go west at all when class is in session….
Yeah, but don’t forget about Gervais and Pickens. For some reason, Gervais backs up from Bull going east, and “blocking the box” is rampant at Pickens as a result.
This is just a few yards from my office on Pickens, and I’ve learned to just not go that way. I head north on Pickens to Lady, and take that westward into downtown. Despite the extreme length of the light where Lady crosses Bull (which I think MAY be the longest in town), I save a lot of time and frustration.
Sometimes I’m not as smart, and I’ve been the object of some of the worst road rage I’ve ever seen when I’ve merged in, making a right turn from Pickens into Gervais. People I pull in front of who are crossing Pickens on Gervais — and I’ve never really cut people off per se, or caused a dangerous situation — are OUTRAGED, and I mean it’s like their heads are going to explode. The honking, the gesturing, the screaming of curses at me. I don’t know what they’re thinking — that I’ve denied them their “right” to block the intersection, I suppose.
One young woman got madder than I have ever seen a woman get (I EXPECT guys to be such A-holes), and I’ve made a few women mad in my day. She pursued me all the way to Assembly, doing her best to pull alongside and make sure I saw and heard her screaming. I looked over at her a couple of times, and my face probably said to her, “Really? I mean, what’s your plan? You gonna beat me up when I get out, or what? I guess I’ll have to take my punishment, because I don’t fight girls.” Which is to say, I probably looked a bit condescending, which, you know, only made her crazier — but I had never seen such a spectacle. Height of absurdity, that someone was so angry over NOTHING. When I turned right on Assembly, she didn’t follow, so I guess I escaped a whuppin’ there…
Yeah, Gervais and Pickens is horrible. When I am heading east on Gervais, I often turn on Bull to avoid the back up, and I do not understand why the traffic westbound on Gervais is so often at a standstill.
Traffic everywhere got much worse right after the flood. There are still a number of roads closed, Woodberry @ The Fat Boy for example, and people are having to take detour routes. These less efficient routes increase traffic just enough to cause a sort of critical mass of excess traffic. The slight excess also creates a sort of feedback. Before the flood the roads were busy but capable (barely) of handling the traffic. Brad’s 26/378 example is (partly) the result of just a few more cars coming off 26 that would have otherwise taken US 1 to Woodberry but now take 26 to 378 and eventually Mineral Springs Road to get to their Woodberry residence. At least that’s my theory. Once Woodberry is re-opened, probably within a couple weeks, the busy, but manageable, situation should return to normal.
Thanks for offering a plausible theory, Bud! And you could be right — it does seem to have started right after the flood.
Those people are frustrated already, having to take a detour home, and that makes them just a little more likely to “block the box.” Makes sense…
Two thoughts:
Blocking the box is groupthink at its worst. It should be a priority for cops – not necessarily to ticket one or two people and move on but instead get out of their cars and play old timey traffic cop. It really helps get people back to thinking.
You may notice from the photo the real problem – the Lex Medical Center entrance. The stacking que westbound is simply to short to accommodate northbound, westbound and southbound vehicles backed up at the entrance light. The northbound vehicles sense that they are at a positioning disadvantage to the other two (and they are) so they crowd the intersection to “claim” their space. Prime example of where a cop on his/her feet could help a lot by eyeballing what is fair. The aerial clearly shows the problem though – when the intersection was rebuilt the east side cross street was moved well east of the interchange – but the all powerful Lex Med blocked moving their entrance westward. And so we have a short stack westbound.
Short of the real long term solution, on thing to do is make the southbound ramp a no right on red full stop. That would even the playing field.
Another problem is that engineers design by the book, and they get stymied when local political manuverings interject themselves on the “perfect plan”. Then engineers act rationally and do everything else right as if thinking their perfect work we be recognized from the sordid mess of others. Instead, they need to be more cunning in how they adapt theoretical perfection to dealing with localized political moves. We would all benefit from that. It is also a more effective form of shaming – help the public feel the impact of the holdout’s demands on everyone else. Build the counterweight of concerned citizens.
Lex Med’s entrance will be moved. It is inevitable. And they know it. And should know it. Continuing to align capital investments around a lousy existing condition is just making it worse – and far more expensive – for themselves down the road.
Groupthink? Seems more like crimethink to me.
But you’re right about the LexMed entrance (far left of the satellite image, folks).
When I brought up this subject to my wife, she said the problem SHE has encountered is people blocking THAT intersection. Say, if you’re coming up from the access road (“Harbor Dr” on the photo), you can’t turn left onto Sunset because of people blocking the intersection — which in turn is closely related to the problem we started with in this post…
and I have frequently suggested/requested that USC cops direct traffic during class changes at Pickens and Greene, and perhaps elsewhere….
Interesting note–I’m in Nashville. We’re staying in a campground near the Opryland Gaylord, which is served by an interchange similar to the one at I-26 and Sunset. There’s a holiday event going on at the Gaylord, and the interchange has had an officer stationed at it all day. He gives his siren a quick blast wheneverit looks like someone is going to block the intersection, which is helping to keep it clear. It’s having the desired effect.
You mean I-40?
I think I know that intersection.
When I covered my first statewide political campaign in 1978, I spent a couple of days traveling with a down-the-ballot candidate for the Democratic nomination for governor. As I’ve noted before, those were the days when we COVERED political campaigns. We didn’t just show up at the events when the candidates did; we traveled with the candidates. In this case, this guy had such a shoestring campaign that he drove himself everywhere in his own car, and I (and sometimes another reporter) rode with him.
He and I had spent the day and evening bopping from town to town, working the loafers sitting around the courthouse in one town, dropping in on a political rally at another. We had done two Democratic rallies in two counties that evening — at one I saw and heard Al Gore for the first time, speaking from a makeshift outdoor stage somewhere in his congressional district, and I was impressed. I actually thought, “That guy’s going to run for president one day.”
Anyway, eventually we headed back toward Jackson, his hometown and mine — about 250 miles or so away. We stopped in Nashville along the way, about 9:30 or 10 p.m. We stopped at a hotel somewhere near that intersection you speak of. My candidate was a Democratic leader in the statehouse, and this was his favorite hotel and watering hole when he stayed there.
We had a couple of scotch and sodas. He had one or two more than I did. Then as we got ready to leave, he insisted we get a couple more, quite literally, “for the road.”
He set his on the dashboard as we went hurtling off down I-40, and drank from it as he drove.
Now something you younger people need to understand. This was before drunken driving was seen as being as serious a crime as it was just a few years later. MADD’s admirable campaign to make drinking and driving completely unacceptable had not had full effect yet.
Also… I was young and dumb. I was not yet 25 years old, and still learning the ways of the world. I knew I shouldn’t drive after drinking like that, but I used to believe there were people who just weren’t affected by it the way I was. It didn’t seem to bother the candidate; it seemed to energize him, as though he were drinking coffee. I know how stupid that is now; I didn’t understand it then. I had a wife and a little daughter and my second child on the way at home, and it occurred to me to worry a little, but the worry didn’t take hold. I was just happy to be heading home to my family.
And we got there OK. But I shudder to think about it now.
Anyway, that’s what I think of when you mention big interstate interchanges in the Opryland area…
Several summers back we spent about a month in each of Chicago and Waterloo, Ontario. In both places, many times, my attentive driver husband had stop rather quickly because the vehicle in front of him stopped on a green light, for fear of blocking the box. Chicago has intersection cameras, and Canada just has polite people, but it can be done….
Talk about polite… In small towns in central Pennsylvania, if you as a pedestrian approach a street, right in the middle of a block — even if you have no intention of crossing; even if you just want to look up and down the street to get your bearings — traffic will STOP, and wait for you to cross. It’s like you’re Moses and traffic is the Red Sea.
I THINK maybe it’s a law there, but it seemed downright supernatural…
When it would happen, I’d go ahead and cross, whether I wanted to or not. I didn’t want to disappoint. And I wasn’t going to be outdone in the politeness game…