By admin 
Columbia could soon change how traffic moves through downtown. For the first time in 25 years, the city has conducted a comprehensive audit of its downtown traffic lights and found dozens of intersections that don’t meet current standards for a traffic signal.
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Columbia officials are now looking at cutting down on traffic lights at some of those intersections, including on Hampton, Laurel, Lady and Sumter streets downtown.
The changes could mean fewer stops for drivers at some lower-volume intersections, but the primary goal of retiming and removing certain lights would be to make the streets safer for pedestrians, said SCDOT traffic engineer Lori Campbell in a presentation to Columbia City Council earlier this month.
“You probably, by design, will not be able to go all the way down Assembly without stopping,” Campbell said, noting that planners are looking to add “intentional pauses” “so that you don’t get up a whole lot of speed … to help with pedestrians.”
When the street grid was last retimed at least 25 years ago, the goal for traffic lights was to help cars hit “green, green, green,” Campbell said.
The old system has also made it harder to make changes to individual intersections, Campbell said, because the signals are interconnected. Adding a green arrow, for example, means taking time from another traffic movement, while retiming one part of the grid can affect signals elsewhere.
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As part of the retiming effort, SCDOT inventoried all 140 traffic signals in Columbia’s downtown grid and identified 36 lower-volume intersections where the signals could potentially be changed. Twenty-five of those 36 did not meet current standards for a traffic signal, opening the door for the city to replace them with stop signs or other traffic controls.
The 25 signals that did not meet the standards are not automatically coming down. City staff will work with SCDOT to review the intersections, check recent crash data and decide which ones should be considered for removal. They could be replaced with two-way or all-way stop signs, or in some cases kept and modified to better accommodate pedestrians.
The switch would happen gradually. SCDOT would first post signs warning drivers about the coming change. About two weeks later, stop signs would go up while the traffic signal flashes. After another roughly two weeks, the signal would be turned off, but the equipment would remain in place for up to 90 days in case officials need to reverse the change because of crashes or other problems.
The review wasn’t prompted solely by traffic volumes. Many of the older signals would require significant investment to bring them up to modern standards, with basic upgrades estimated at about $40,000 per intersection and some locations requiring much more extensive reconstruction. That led SCDOT and city officials to question whether it makes sense to spend money rebuilding signals that would not meet today’s standards if the intersections were being evaluated from scratch.
City staff will work with SCDOT to review the 36 intersections and determine which, if any, should move forward for signal removal or other changes. Public Works, Planning, Police and Fire are expected to weigh in before recommendations come back to City Council.
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