Privately funded interchange well underway on Carolina Bays Parkway

A new interchange along the Carolina Bays Parkway (SC 31) that is being built with private funds may open by year's end. The interchange which is about one mile south of the Parkway's giant intersection with SC 22 (Conway Bypass) is being funded by a group of four property owners that call themselves the 'Parkway Group'.

Although the cost of the interchange project has not been released, the group has invested $3 million in private money to preserve 305 acres of Tiger Bay which sits within the Lewis Ocean Bays Heritage Preserve, an environmentally sensitive area that borders much of the Parkway.

Local property owners had been lobbying for an interchange with the Carolina Bays Parkway since 2001 seeing that their area is close to two (SC 22 and SC 31) new major highways but with no direct access.

The interchange is being built to state standards and once completed the interchange and access roads will be absorbed into the state highway system.

Currently, the interchange will lead to predominantly undeveloped land. The property owners that make up the Parkway Group have no current development plans for the land.

Story:
New SC 31 exit soon to be complete ---Myrtle Beach Sun News

Commentary:
I have no issue with private land owners investing in their local and sometimes regional infrastructure. In fact, this is possibly over a $5 million project (when you include the wetland mitigation of $3 million) that the state will not have to pay.

Some will argue that this project will only serve to increase sprawl in Myrtle Beach. And, yes this may likely lead to a large development project in the specific area. However and most importantly, it was decided by four primary landowners to invest in the infrastructure needed to bring the most value to their land. It is their right and decision to do that, and the growth and decisions to develop the land may actually be handled and run many times better than the state or local governments could ever do.

Comments

Paper Highways: The Unbuilt New Orleans Bypass (Proposed I-410)

There are many examples around the United States of proposed freeway corridors in urban areas that never saw the light of day for one reason or another. They all fall somewhere in between the little-known and the infamous and from the mundane to the spectacular. One of the more obscure and interesting examples of such a project is the short-lived idea to construct a southern beltway for the New Orleans metropolitan area in the 1960s and 70s. Greater New Orleans and its surrounding area grew rapidly in the years after World War II, as suburban sprawl encroached on the historically rural downriver parishes around the city. In response to the development of the region’s Westbank and the emergence of communities in St. Charles and St. John the Baptist Parishes as viable suburban communities during this period, regional planners began to consider concepts for new infrastructure projects to serve this growing population. The idea for a circular freeway around the southern perimeter of t

Hernando de Soto Bridge (Memphis, TN)

The newest of the bridges that span the lower Mississippi River at Memphis, the Hernando de Soto Bridge was completed in 1973 and carries Interstate 40 between downtown Memphis and West Memphis, AR. The bridge’s signature M-shaped superstructure makes it an instantly recognizable landmark in the city and one of the most visually unique bridges on the Mississippi River. As early as 1953, Memphis city planners recommended the construction of a second highway bridge across the Mississippi River to connect the city with West Memphis, AR. The Memphis & Arkansas Bridge had been completed only four years earlier a couple miles downriver from downtown, however it was expected that long-term growth in the metro area would warrant the construction of an additional bridge, the fourth crossing of the Mississippi River to be built at Memphis, in the not-too-distant future. Unlike the previous three Mississippi River bridges to be built the city, the location chosen for this bridge was about two

Memphis & Arkansas Bridge (Memphis, TN)

Like the expansion of the railroads the previous century, the modernization of the country’s highway infrastructure in the early and mid 20th Century required the construction of new landmark bridges along the lower Mississippi River (and nation-wide for that matter) that would facilitate the expected growth in overall traffic demand in ensuing decades. While this new movement had been anticipated to some extent in the Memphis area with the design of the Harahan Bridge, neither it nor its neighbor the older Frisco Bridge were capable of accommodating the sharp rise in the popularity and demand of the automobile as a mode of cross-river transportation during the Great Depression. As was the case 30 years prior, the solution in the 1940s was to construct a new bridge in the same general location as its predecessors, only this time the bridge would be the first built exclusively for vehicle traffic. This bridge, the Memphis & Arkansas Bridge, was completed in 1949 and was the third

Gribblenation

Search This Blog