Roads, more traveled

By Charles Sowell  

FEBRUARY 23, 2010 7:05 p.m. (0)

The city of Greenville has spent more than $12 million since the late 1970s on street beautification along Main Street, an investment city leaders say has paid off handsomely in new businesses and developments such as River Place.

The original work on Main in 1979 cost $2.5 million and was paid for through revenue sharing funds, said Nancy Whitworth director of economic development for the city. Those improvements included narrowing the street, widening the sidewalk and planting hundreds of trees and bushes.

Since 1987 the city has funded streetscape programs in the downtown area with Tax Increment Fund (TIF) bonds that use increases in property tax values to repay bonds issued for public improvements, said Mayor Knox White.

The city has three TIF districts: Central Business District, West End and Viola Street.

The cost varies greatly from project to project, said Andrew Meeker urban planner for the city. Some projects involve purely above ground, cosmetic changes like new sidewalks, trees, landscaping, lights, or traffic signals, he said. Other work gets much more involved with things like underground utility upgrades that can tally considerable cost.

“Generally, a streetscape project constructed by a contractor with both above ground and below ground improvements runs between $500 to  $1,000 per linear of foot of street,” Meeker said.

Generally speaking, trees cost about $250 each; streetlights cost $5,000 per light; and concrete sidewalks are $24 a linear foot, Meeker said.

The city plans $5.7 million in street beautification through 2014 and has budgeted $250,000 for the streetscape master plan, which will be used to set priorities in the near and long term.

Streetscaping and other infrastructure work can be expensive. It cost about $4 million for street improvements done in conjunction with building Fluor Field in 2006, said Jim Bourey, Greenville City manager. That money, too, came out of West End TIF.

The city plans to split the Rhett Street project into three parts to deal with the cost, said Meeker. The longest section of Rhett planned for renovation is 800 feet between Wardlaw and Markley streets with an estimated cost of more than $1 million, or $1,250 per linear foot.

The city plans to add trees, improve sidewalk with decorative brick and consolidate power poles.

Just getting underway is the West Washington Street project between the Post Office and Amtrak station. The city is buying land and will spend $476,540 on trees, sidewalks, street lighting that will give the area a look more like Main Street.

Long considered one of the most rundown major streets near downtown the area around the train station has undergone extensive urban renewal. Public housing projects in the area have been renovated. New houses built in place of those at Embassy Court and on Mulberry Street. A couple of buildings have been renovated for new businesses.

But not every beautification project has been wildly successful.

The $625,000 McBee Avenue project was to include improvements to support the long-delayed Peacock Hotel. The project, announced in 2006, was to house a hotel and spa but construction has been stalled for two years.

Officials have shifted some of the emphasis to the area around McBee Station, a housing and retail center anchored by Publix and Staples.

East Broad Street is getting $270,000 of a budgeted $480,000 for surface improvements from South Main Street to David Francis Street, located just east of McBee Station, as well as improvements to curbs and gutters and a reconfiguration of the Broad and McDaniel Avenue intersection.

Streetscapes, at their core, transform a road from a way to move cars and trucks to a public space shared by vehicular traffic, bicyclists, shoppers and tourists, said Donald G. Wishart of AECOM, the city’s streetscape master plan design consultants that bought the city’s original planner, Glatting Jackson Kercher Anglin.

The firm held a “Walkability Workshop” tour of downtown in December, and a public session last week at City Hall to discuss their findings.

Two highway bridges on Church Street and Academy are limiting factors on how much redesign can be done to make those streets more pedestrian friendly, according to AECOM.

And there are problems with “superblocks” made up of Springwood Cemetery and McPherson Park near the start of Academy Street, Wishart said.

There are no streets to bleed off traffic in those areas so things tend to snarl during rush hours, he said.

The consultants hope to deal with those issues by modifying driving lanes and further slowing traffic as it passes through the city’s center.

That’s good news for the mayor.

“One of the biggest things we had to overcome in transforming our downtown was the engineering standards of the ‘60s and ‘70s.” White said.

The wide boulevards that made up downtown in that era moved traffic through efficiently and the soaring flyover bridge on Church Street was at one time a Greenville icon.

“That one structure alone kept a big chunk of downtown from being developed for many years, until we got McBee Station,” White said. “There was some development. But, honestly, who wants to build underneath a bridge?”

The problem with roadways that are efficient traffic movers is they are not pedestrian friendly, said Wishart. People shop and spend money. Vehicular traffic moves people though an area and not necessarily to an area.

At its inception Greenville’s Main Street plan seemed counter intuitive, White said. But narrowing Main Street and making the sidewalks more pedestrian friendly  opened the door to developing some productive and expensive business and residential property.

In the intervening years the city has become adept at combining pedestrian friendly infrastructure like streetscaping with attractions like Falls Park.

AECOM would like to continue that process linking Heritage Green with the Bi-Lo Center. Wishart’s staff would narrow the roadways, add width to the sidewalks, and weave in things like on-street dining, bike lanes and mini-parks.